I wouldn’t be surprised if Angela Rayner wrote that piece herself, she was only ever going to be the big winner once it was published. Bare with me, I’m saying there must be female politicians of all sides long since dead, looking down delighted how this piece is being called out as having no place in politics today - how what was once an effective hatchet piece is now a seminal moment, marking cultural change for the better. Not least, how someone with her background can’t possibly debate effectively against the educated Johnson. Thank you very much Mail on Sunday 😃
However, though it’s being argued Ang is entitled to do her hair and hemline her way, be however she feels comfortable within whatever work place dress codes there are these days (would be fun getting Rees Mogg onto those) if she asked me to style her to improve her career prospects I would still, as I have long argued, lob the hair and drop the hemline below the knee. Yes it’s important to look in mirror feel good about yourself, see and feel the positives not negatives - but there is a price to pay, a compromise to strike for anyone serious about career - nothing to do with sex, as improving career prospects by dressing to a certain conventional style applies equally to men and women, where rules of the game are don’t concede an inch to your opponents, so don’t in anyway stand out or be unconventional would be my opinion.
Do you know what is the most insane thing about what the Mail have done, not picked up yet? A couple of PMQs ago, as a lady sitting behind Boris (the one always there and constantly tapping into the phone) crossed her legs, we all saw her knickers.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
I'll back that view as well, just from talking to CMOs and CDOs from start ups we're invested in.
Ask them where they get their attribution models from, who provides the inputs and have they done proper econometric modelling. But ask them the first one first.
Also. That's not how it works. I use Kochava for attribution, and if someone clicks on a Google advert and goes on to buy the policy, I know exactly which advert they saw.
For literally every single one of my new customers I can see where they come from, with incredibly levels of granularity. So, I can look at J Smith, and see that he signed up today at 2:22pm, after clicking on a Google Search Advert for "auto insurance safer drivers". And I can do it the other way round too - I can see for each advertising campaign how many people clicked on it, how many downloaded the app, how many got through the welcome screen, etc.
Best of all, I can see that people who click on "cheap auto insurance" focused advertisements churn at much higher rates than those looking for "per mile".
I could have told you that people focused on total cost are less loyal than people who will buy a segment of a product at a higher unit cost but lower absolute cost.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
I'll back that view as well, just from talking to CMOs and CDOs from start ups we're invested in.
Ask them where they get their attribution models from, who provides the inputs and have they done proper econometric modelling. But ask them the first one first.
Most are building their own revenue attribution models. I have no idea why any would do econometrics, it's unnecessary in an age of user modelling and user targeting. Forecasting is done on the basis of lead quality/scoring and click RoI. One of the reasons lead scoring has become such a vital tool is because it feeds directly into profitability projections.
+100
This isn't naïve optimizing around one-off conversions any more, this is looking at LTVs.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
The problem with click to conversion is that it can be hard to know what exactly drove the user to your site. Click through rates are seen as a very imprecise metric but, as Churchill said about democracy, better than the alternatives.
Having said that, certainly for start up businesses, Google and FB have merit. Self-serve is a big plus and, TBF, you can get a degree of targeting (although nowhere near as much as they claim). However, when businesses get bigger, they switch to TV because it offers reach that the platforms can’t provide.
Well, we're selling app based auto insurance to young urban professionals. I'm not convinced that traditional television (which my customer base spends very little time watching) is the right channel.
I was in a meeting with a CTO today who was bemoaning the lack of quality leads for a SaaS company to sell to. Maybe I should tell him to get his marketing department to buy TV ads!
Depends on the size of the company.
Direct Line is very clear about this - the best combo is TV +’search, TV to drive brand and Search so people go online afterwards.
Many CMOs implicitly recognise spending solely on online doesn’t work but, if they tell their Boards that, they are seen as backwards looking and pushed out the door.
Direct Line is an old persons company. It has old people clients and is run, primarily by old people for old people. TV will work fine for them, eventually it won't as new customers stop replacing dead ones because smaller insurance companies that have targeted them on Google and Instagram will already have their business.
It's why there's so many insurance start ups, the market is already shifting. In an adjacent industry it's causing the likes of Hargreaves to try and compete with Trading212, Freetrade and soon Robin Hood because they've realised they have zero market share under the age of 40.
Mmmmmmm
Take a look at the strategy of these start-ups, it’s pretty clear - start advertising online and then go to more traditional media. You can’t get reach solely with online unless you want a niche (or you’re Elon Musk).
Take another sector. Amongst the biggest spenders on TV at the moment are companies such as Just Eat and Deliveroo. Certainly not old people’s companies unless you think the Grannies are ordering MacyDs at 12pm at night.
The idea that everyone < 35 is watching online is a lazy one and there are already signs YT / FB usage is coming off the boil (take a look ag FB’s last reports)
That’s pretty specific targeting - people who are watching TV at that moment in time and want food then
The reason internet bank brands failed to grow to any significant size was the cost of customer acquisition. Mixed branch and online brands found that they could acquire customers economically via remote channels but only in areas where they already had a branch.
For some products and services customers need to know there is a face to face service if they need it even if they never use it.
If you ever try dealing with a big organisation when there is a problem it will soon educate you about arguing with a faceless company where no one person takes responsibility or is accountable for mistakes.
One wonders re: Elon Musk's motives re: the Twit-sphere? Pure altruism seems unlikely.
He has stated everybody will have to authenticate. One big problem twitter has always has, they don't know who their users are, and something that has always given Facebook a huge advantage in terms of making money.
Perhaps this is where he see the value prop.
Except Twitter does sort of know who its users are, even if not authenticated. It knows what they tweet, who they follow, who follows them, what tweets they read without following, what they search for and so on. It can also classify users into groups based on these factors. In other words, Twitter might not know everybody's real name and address but it does know who they are in behavioural terms and *that* is what will make them, and Facebook, attractive to advertisers.
One wonders re: Elon Musk's motives re: the Twit-sphere? Pure altruism seems unlikely.
He has stated everybody will have to authenticate. One big problem twitter has always has, they don't know who their users are, and something that has always given Facebook a huge advantage in terms of making money.
Perhaps this is where he see the value prop.
Except Twitter does sort of know who its users are, even if not authenticated. It knows what they tweet, who they follow, who follows them, what tweets they read without following, what they search for and so on. It can also classify users into groups based on these factors. In other words, Twitter might not know everybody's real name and address but it does know who they are in behavioural terms and *that* is what will make them, and Facebook, attractive to advertisers.
No, you are wrong here. It is total chalk and cheese. Facebook knows so much about everybody, they even have "shadow" profiles (i.e. profiles of people who never even signed up), and they can de-anonymise datasets they buy using the information that people provide to Facebook combined with public records.
As a result, you can target Facebook ads at a ridiculously granular level. Google can, Amazon can, Facebook can, Twitter can't. As a result they are hamstrung when it comes to selling advertising services. Its is why Facebook makes squillions and Twitter has always struggled to make money in comparison to that.
How much approx would it cost to fill up a car’s petrol tank in 1951?
It’s late in the UK but perhaps some older insomniacs can remember…the online stuff I’ve read suggest it was hideously expensive and I’m having trouble believing it…
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
That isn't what that research says. Its saying which tweets got amplified by the algorithm, but not why that happened and whom interacted with it to cause it.
You only have to look on twitter at any given day and some right wing person will tweet something stupid and the mob jump on it e.g. today was Andrew Pierce about home price increase...it was being amplified because a load of people were going look at this right wing idiot.
Owen Jones consistently does this, points out something and the mob pile on "interacts" with the tweet making it go trending. It isn't right wingers causing that trending to appear, but the metric will say ring wing person tweet got lots of engagement.
The reason internet bank brands failed to grow to any significant size was the cost of customer acquisition. Mixed branch and online brands found that they could acquire customers economically via remote channels but only in areas where they already had a branch.
For some products and services customers need to know there is a face to face service if they need it even if they never use it.
If you ever try dealing with a big organisation when there is a problem it will soon educate you about arguing with a faceless company where no one person takes responsibility or is accountable for mistakes.
Two alternative perspectives. First, I think the real dynamic is that almost nobody switches bank account (not credit cards or the like), so the market progresses funeral by funeral. I know a lot of higher-income, mobile young people in euro countries, and very often they are primary users of Revolut or N26. But local service providers often refuse to deal with Lithuanian or German or any non-national bank, so they end up needing a local account to enjoy full access to direct debits or salary payments. Second, I tried to open a N26 for euro payments and blundered during the application in some way; funny, the endless delays in getting the process restarted put me off the product altogether.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
I'll back that view as well, just from talking to CMOs and CDOs from start ups we're invested in.
Ask them where they get their attribution models from, who provides the inputs and have they done proper econometric modelling. But ask them the first one first.
Most are building their own revenue attribution models. I have no idea why any would do econometrics, it's unnecessary in an age of user modelling and user targeting. Forecasting is done on the basis of lead quality/scoring and click RoI. One of the reasons lead scoring has become such a vital tool is because it feeds directly into profitability projections.
+100
This isn't naïve optimizing around one-off conversions any more, this is looking at LTVs.
How do you view acquisition cost to LTV ratios?
We are currently at 3.5x, and I reckon we can get to 5x.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
That isn't what that research says. Its saying which tweets got amplified by the algorithm, but not why that happened and whom interacted with it to cause it.
You only have to look on twitter at any given day and some right wing person will tweet something stupid and the mob jump on it e.g. today was Andrew Pierce about home price increase...it was being amplified because a load of people were going look at this right wing idiot.
Owen Jones consistently does this, points out something and the mob pile on "interacts" with the tweet making it go trending. It isn't right wingers causing that trending to appear, but the metric will say ring wing person tweet got lots of engagement.
Yes but I'm not sure you are disagreeing. Even if that is the mechanism in most rather than some cases, and Twitter itself seems not to be sure, the net result is amplification of right wing views. The idea that Twitter is dominated by a shadowy left-wing cabal is not borne out. I suspect that idea is mostly due to a few prominent right-wingers like Donald Trump being barred over fomenting insurrection.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
That isn't what that research says. Its saying which tweets got amplified by the algorithm, but not why that happened and whom interacted with it to cause it.
You only have to look on twitter at any given day and some right wing person will tweet something stupid and the mob jump on it e.g. today was Andrew Pierce about home price increase...it was being amplified because a load of people were going look at this right wing idiot.
Owen Jones consistently does this, points out something and the mob pile on "interacts" with the tweet making it go trending. It isn't right wingers causing that trending to appear, but the metric will say ring wing person tweet got lots of engagement.
Yes but I'm not sure you are disagreeing. Even if that is the mechanism in most rather than some cases, and Twitter itself seems not to be sure, the net result is amplification of right wing views. The idea that Twitter is dominated by a shadowy left-wing cabal is not borne out. I suspect that idea is mostly due to a few prominent right-wingers like Donald Trump being barred over fomenting insurrection.
I am disagreeing. The research sounds horrendously flawed and says nothing about who dominants the twitter-sphere. A single right wing tweet getting lots of engagement, it can easily be because a lefty mob is enacting a pile on. That like saying the bloke in the town square is getting lots of engagement because the mob are screaming at him as soon as he speaks, doesn't mean that the town square is enabling fair and balanced discussion and is dressing to the direction of the bloke getting shouted down.
Now do I think twitter is as one sided as that, no. But you made the claim its "dresses right".
How much approx would it cost to fill up a car’s petrol tank in 1951?
It’s late in the UK but perhaps some older insomniacs can remember…the online stuff I’ve read suggest it was hideously expensive and I’m having trouble believing it…
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
That isn't what that research says. Its saying which tweets got amplified by the algorithm, but not why that happened and whom interacted with it to cause it.
You only have to look on twitter at any given day and some right wing person will tweet something stupid and the mob jump on it e.g. today was Andrew Pierce about home price increase...it was being amplified because a load of people were going look at this right wing idiot.
Owen Jones consistently does this, points out something and the mob pile on "interacts" with the tweet making it go trending. It isn't right wingers causing that trending to appear, but the metric will say ring wing person tweet got lots of engagement.
Yes but I'm not sure you are disagreeing. Even if that is the mechanism in most rather than some cases, and Twitter itself seems not to be sure, the net result is amplification of right wing views. The idea that Twitter is dominated by a shadowy left-wing cabal is not borne out. I suspect that idea is mostly due to a few prominent right-wingers like Donald Trump being barred over fomenting insurrection.
I am disagreeing. The research sounds horrendously flawed and says nothing about who dominants the twitter-sphere. A single right wing tweet getting lots of engagement, it can easily be because a lefty mob is enacting a pile on. That like saying the bloke in the town square is getting lots of engagement because the mob are screaming at him as soon as he speaks, doesn't mean that the town square is enabling fair and balanced discussion and is dressing to the direction of the bloke getting shouted down.
Now do I think twitter is as one sided as that, no. But you made the claim its "dresses right".
Here is the original research which looked at the amplification of tweets by MPs and their foreign equivalents. It found that tweets by Conservatives were amplified more than those by Labour and other parties whether or not government ministers were excluded (and similarly overseas). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
That isn't what that research says. Its saying which tweets got amplified by the algorithm, but not why that happened and whom interacted with it to cause it.
You only have to look on twitter at any given day and some right wing person will tweet something stupid and the mob jump on it e.g. today was Andrew Pierce about home price increase...it was being amplified because a load of people were going look at this right wing idiot.
Owen Jones consistently does this, points out something and the mob pile on "interacts" with the tweet making it go trending. It isn't right wingers causing that trending to appear, but the metric will say ring wing person tweet got lots of engagement.
Yes but I'm not sure you are disagreeing. Even if that is the mechanism in most rather than some cases, and Twitter itself seems not to be sure, the net result is amplification of right wing views. The idea that Twitter is dominated by a shadowy left-wing cabal is not borne out. I suspect that idea is mostly due to a few prominent right-wingers like Donald Trump being barred over fomenting insurrection.
I am disagreeing. The research sounds horrendously flawed and says nothing about who dominants the twitter-sphere. A single right wing tweet getting lots of engagement, it can easily be because a lefty mob is enacting a pile on. That like saying the bloke in the town square is getting lots of engagement because the mob are screaming at him as soon as he speaks, doesn't mean that the town square is enabling fair and balanced discussion and is dressing to the direction of the bloke getting shouted down.
Now do I think twitter is as one sided as that, no. But you made the claim its "dresses right".
Here is the original research which looked at the amplification of tweets by MPs and their foreign equivalents. It found that tweets by Conservatives were amplified more than those by Labour and other parties whether or not government ministers were excluded (and similarly overseas). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
Again, you are missing the point. Engagement doesn't mean twitter dresses right. It means the algorithm is seeing a lot of people interacting with the tweet, and it being twitter it usually means negatively. Every day on twitter its #Boris....as in #BorisOut, #BorisLiar, #BorisKillingGrannies, etc etc etc.
As I gave the example, the bloke in the town square as soon as he opens his mouth getting screamed at by a mob, doesn't mean the guy is getting preferential treatment in any way. On most social media, if people vaguely agree with something, they just keep scrolling past. The passionate (and usually angry) are the ones spending time replying like crazy with comments saying you liar, cheat, fraud, etc.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
That isn't what that research says. Its saying which tweets got amplified by the algorithm, but not why that happened and whom interacted with it to cause it.
You only have to look on twitter at any given day and some right wing person will tweet something stupid and the mob jump on it e.g. today was Andrew Pierce about home price increase...it was being amplified because a load of people were going look at this right wing idiot.
Owen Jones consistently does this, points out something and the mob pile on "interacts" with the tweet making it go trending. It isn't right wingers causing that trending to appear, but the metric will say ring wing person tweet got lots of engagement.
Yes but I'm not sure you are disagreeing. Even if that is the mechanism in most rather than some cases, and Twitter itself seems not to be sure, the net result is amplification of right wing views. The idea that Twitter is dominated by a shadowy left-wing cabal is not borne out. I suspect that idea is mostly due to a few prominent right-wingers like Donald Trump being barred over fomenting insurrection.
I am disagreeing. The research sounds horrendously flawed and says nothing about who dominants the twitter-sphere. A single right wing tweet getting lots of engagement, it can easily be because a lefty mob is enacting a pile on. That like saying the bloke in the town square is getting lots of engagement because the mob are screaming at him as soon as he speaks, doesn't mean that the town square is enabling fair and balanced discussion and is dressing to the direction of the bloke getting shouted down.
Now do I think twitter is as one sided as that, no. But you made the claim its "dresses right".
Here is the original research which looked at the amplification of tweets by MPs and their foreign equivalents. It found that tweets by Conservatives were amplified more than those by Labour and other parties whether or not government ministers were excluded (and similarly overseas). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
Again, you are missing the point. Engagement doesn't mean twitter dresses right. It means the algorithm is seeing a lot of people interacting with the tweet, and it being twitter it usually means negatively. Every day on twitter its #Boris....as in #BorisOut, #BorisLiar, #BorisKillingGrannies, etc etc etc.
Even if you are correct about the mechanism, the net result is the amplification of those right-wing tweets. In other words, the original (right-wing) tweets are promoted and presented to more people.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
That isn't what that research says. Its saying which tweets got amplified by the algorithm, but not why that happened and whom interacted with it to cause it.
You only have to look on twitter at any given day and some right wing person will tweet something stupid and the mob jump on it e.g. today was Andrew Pierce about home price increase...it was being amplified because a load of people were going look at this right wing idiot.
Owen Jones consistently does this, points out something and the mob pile on "interacts" with the tweet making it go trending. It isn't right wingers causing that trending to appear, but the metric will say ring wing person tweet got lots of engagement.
Yes but I'm not sure you are disagreeing. Even if that is the mechanism in most rather than some cases, and Twitter itself seems not to be sure, the net result is amplification of right wing views. The idea that Twitter is dominated by a shadowy left-wing cabal is not borne out. I suspect that idea is mostly due to a few prominent right-wingers like Donald Trump being barred over fomenting insurrection.
I am disagreeing. The research sounds horrendously flawed and says nothing about who dominants the twitter-sphere. A single right wing tweet getting lots of engagement, it can easily be because a lefty mob is enacting a pile on. That like saying the bloke in the town square is getting lots of engagement because the mob are screaming at him as soon as he speaks, doesn't mean that the town square is enabling fair and balanced discussion and is dressing to the direction of the bloke getting shouted down.
Now do I think twitter is as one sided as that, no. But you made the claim its "dresses right".
Here is the original research which looked at the amplification of tweets by MPs and their foreign equivalents. It found that tweets by Conservatives were amplified more than those by Labour and other parties whether or not government ministers were excluded (and similarly overseas). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
Again, you are missing the point. Engagement doesn't mean twitter dresses right. It means the algorithm is seeing a lot of people interacting with the tweet, and it being twitter it usually means negatively. Every day on twitter its #Boris....as in #BorisOut, #BorisLiar, #BorisKillingGrannies, etc etc etc.
Even if you are correct about the mechanism, the net result is the amplification of those right-wing tweets. In other words, the original (right-wing) tweets are promoted and presented to more people.
But to people who are against them.....complete with a massive stream of criticism. Its doesn't mean "twitter dresses right". Its like saying well the Guardian amplifies right wing because they report Boris comments, comment with 1000s of words of criticism.
I think its actually simpler. Oldies who traditionally lean right dominate the Facebook. The teenagers dominate the TikTok. The 18-35 year olds, and a certain demographic of uni educated etc etc etc, who traditionally lean left dominant on the (political) twitter.
“I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on TRUTH,” Trump told Fox News. “I hope Elon buys Twitter because he’ll make improvements to it and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on TRUTH.” (source Seattle Times)
“I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on TRUTH,” Trump told Fox News. “I hope Elon buys Twitter because he’ll make improvements to it and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on TRUTH.” (source Seattle Times)
Not sure I'd bet the farm on that. Or 2-cents.
You not suggesting that old Trumpy tells lies do you.....outrageous.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
That isn't what that research says. Its saying which tweets got amplified by the algorithm, but not why that happened and whom interacted with it to cause it.
You only have to look on twitter at any given day and some right wing person will tweet something stupid and the mob jump on it e.g. today was Andrew Pierce about home price increase...it was being amplified because a load of people were going look at this right wing idiot.
Owen Jones consistently does this, points out something and the mob pile on "interacts" with the tweet making it go trending. It isn't right wingers causing that trending to appear, but the metric will say ring wing person tweet got lots of engagement.
Yes but I'm not sure you are disagreeing. Even if that is the mechanism in most rather than some cases, and Twitter itself seems not to be sure, the net result is amplification of right wing views. The idea that Twitter is dominated by a shadowy left-wing cabal is not borne out. I suspect that idea is mostly due to a few prominent right-wingers like Donald Trump being barred over fomenting insurrection.
I am disagreeing. The research sounds horrendously flawed and says nothing about who dominants the twitter-sphere. A single right wing tweet getting lots of engagement, it can easily be because a lefty mob is enacting a pile on. That like saying the bloke in the town square is getting lots of engagement because the mob are screaming at him as soon as he speaks, doesn't mean that the town square is enabling fair and balanced discussion and is dressing to the direction of the bloke getting shouted down.
Now do I think twitter is as one sided as that, no. But you made the claim its "dresses right".
Here is the original research which looked at the amplification of tweets by MPs and their foreign equivalents. It found that tweets by Conservatives were amplified more than those by Labour and other parties whether or not government ministers were excluded (and similarly overseas). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
Again, you are missing the point. Engagement doesn't mean twitter dresses right. It means the algorithm is seeing a lot of people interacting with the tweet, and it being twitter it usually means negatively. Every day on twitter its #Boris....as in #BorisOut, #BorisLiar, #BorisKillingGrannies, etc etc etc.
Even if you are correct about the mechanism, the net result is the amplification of those right-wing tweets. In other words, the original (right-wing) tweets are promoted and presented to more people.
But to people who are against them.....complete with a massive stream of criticism. Its doesn't mean "twitter dresses right". Its like saying well the Guardian amplifies right wing because they report Boris comments, comment with 1000s of words of criticism.
I think its actually simpler. Oldies who traditionally lean right dominate the Facebook. The teenagers dominate the TikTok. The 18-35 year olds, and a certain demographic of uni educated etc etc etc, who traditionally lean left dominant on the (political) twitter.
No, Twitter amplifies right-wing comments to those of its users who have chosen to receive tweets ranked by relevance rather than by time. That is what the researchers examined. They also sought to control for the fact that governments make most of the news (which probably explains the alleged lefty bias of comedy panel shows) by checking if the exclusion of ministers' tweets evened things up.
What you seem to be saying might well be true, that attacking others' views generates engagement, and so Twitter will favour divisiveness (thus pleasing Russian trolls and their bosses) but that does not negate, and might not even explain, the above finding about amplification of right-wing views.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
That isn't what that research says. Its saying which tweets got amplified by the algorithm, but not why that happened and whom interacted with it to cause it.
You only have to look on twitter at any given day and some right wing person will tweet something stupid and the mob jump on it e.g. today was Andrew Pierce about home price increase...it was being amplified because a load of people were going look at this right wing idiot.
Owen Jones consistently does this, points out something and the mob pile on "interacts" with the tweet making it go trending. It isn't right wingers causing that trending to appear, but the metric will say ring wing person tweet got lots of engagement.
Yes but I'm not sure you are disagreeing. Even if that is the mechanism in most rather than some cases, and Twitter itself seems not to be sure, the net result is amplification of right wing views. The idea that Twitter is dominated by a shadowy left-wing cabal is not borne out. I suspect that idea is mostly due to a few prominent right-wingers like Donald Trump being barred over fomenting insurrection.
I am disagreeing. The research sounds horrendously flawed and says nothing about who dominants the twitter-sphere. A single right wing tweet getting lots of engagement, it can easily be because a lefty mob is enacting a pile on. That like saying the bloke in the town square is getting lots of engagement because the mob are screaming at him as soon as he speaks, doesn't mean that the town square is enabling fair and balanced discussion and is dressing to the direction of the bloke getting shouted down.
Now do I think twitter is as one sided as that, no. But you made the claim its "dresses right".
Here is the original research which looked at the amplification of tweets by MPs and their foreign equivalents. It found that tweets by Conservatives were amplified more than those by Labour and other parties whether or not government ministers were excluded (and similarly overseas). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
Again, you are missing the point. Engagement doesn't mean twitter dresses right. It means the algorithm is seeing a lot of people interacting with the tweet, and it being twitter it usually means negatively. Every day on twitter its #Boris....as in #BorisOut, #BorisLiar, #BorisKillingGrannies, etc etc etc.
Even if you are correct about the mechanism, the net result is the amplification of those right-wing tweets. In other words, the original (right-wing) tweets are promoted and presented to more people.
But to people who are against them.....complete with a massive stream of criticism. Its doesn't mean "twitter dresses right". Its like saying well the Guardian amplifies right wing because they report Boris comments, comment with 1000s of words of criticism.
I think its actually simpler. Oldies who traditionally lean right dominate the Facebook. The teenagers dominate the TikTok. The 18-35 year olds, and a certain demographic of uni educated etc etc etc, who traditionally lean left dominant on the (political) twitter.
No, Twitter amplifies right-wing comments to those of its users who have chosen to receive tweets ranked by relevance rather than by time. That is what the researchers examined. They also sought to control for the fact that governments make most of the news (which probably explains the alleged lefty bias of comedy panel shows) by checking if the exclusion of ministers' tweets evened things up.
What you seem to be saying might well be true, that attacking others' views generates engagement, and so Twitter will favour divisiveness (thus pleasing Russian trolls and their bosses) but that does not negate, and might not even explain, the above finding about amplification of right-wing views.
None of this equals your original comment "twitter dresses right". Relevance will be literally people who appear interested in politics, which if you user base of political anoraks leans left (which I would suggest twitter does), it means they will be getting it (with all the criticism).
As I say, its like how the Guardian will always report a JRM or Ben Bradley or whatever other Tory numpty has made a foul of themselves to their readers, less so lefty MPs.
I stick by my analogy of the random guy in the town square getting shouted down. Yes all the racket everybody is made aware, but all that is happening is a massive pile on, he isn't getting a fair shake to explain their position and the mob just fire hose negative comments against it.
Anyway, bit bored of the discussion now. It isn't really that interesting. I am not that interested in twitter before or after Elon bought it.
“I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on TRUTH,” Trump told Fox News. “I hope Elon buys Twitter because he’ll make improvements to it and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on TRUTH.” (source Seattle Times)
Not sure I'd bet the farm on that. Or 2-cents.
You not suggesting that old Trumpy tells lies do you.....outrageous.
Operation part of 45's statement is that Musk "is a good man" though NOT in general sense of word good.
Rather in specific (or rather egocentric) sense - good for Trump.
How much approx would it cost to fill up a car’s petrol tank in 1951?
It’s late in the UK but perhaps some older insomniacs can remember…the online stuff I’ve read suggest it was hideously expensive and I’m having trouble believing it…
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
I'll back that view as well, just from talking to CMOs and CDOs from start ups we're invested in.
Ask them where they get their attribution models from, who provides the inputs and have they done proper econometric modelling. But ask them the first one first.
Most are building their own revenue attribution models. I have no idea why any would do econometrics, it's unnecessary in an age of user modelling and user targeting. Forecasting is done on the basis of lead quality/scoring and click RoI. One of the reasons lead scoring has become such a vital tool is because it feeds directly into profitability projections.
+100
This isn't naïve optimizing around one-off conversions any more, this is looking at LTVs.
How do you view acquisition cost to LTV ratios?
We are currently at 3.5x, and I reckon we can get to 5x.
I don’t know your market, but in the space I do know 4.5-5.0x is where the returns start to work
How much approx would it cost to fill up a car’s petrol tank in 1951?
It’s late in the UK but perhaps some older insomniacs can remember…the online stuff I’ve read suggest it was hideously expensive and I’m having trouble believing it…
22/6
Wouldn't rationing have been the problem?
Petrol rationing ended May 1950. Mind you, Anglo-Iranian was nationalised in March 1951 and I presume this affected oil prices…
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
I'll back that view as well, just from talking to CMOs and CDOs from start ups we're invested in.
Ask them where they get their attribution models from, who provides the inputs and have they done proper econometric modelling. But ask them the first one first.
Most are building their own revenue attribution models. I have no idea why any would do econometrics, it's unnecessary in an age of user modelling and user targeting. Forecasting is done on the basis of lead quality/scoring and click RoI. One of the reasons lead scoring has become such a vital tool is because it feeds directly into profitability projections.
+100
This isn't naïve optimizing around one-off conversions any more, this is looking at LTVs.
How do you view acquisition cost to LTV ratios?
We are currently at 3.5x, and I reckon we can get to 5x.
I don’t know your market, but in the space I do know 4.5-5.0x is where the returns start to work
I think it rather depends on how much you can scale your offering off a relatively fixed cost base, and also the speed at which you can recycle your capital.
The returns on equity in my business start to make sense (as in you'll exceed your cost of capital) in the high 2s, and look pretty amazing once you get north of 4x
This Indonesian decision is going to put fuel onto the inflation fire:
It announced the export ban on 22 April, until further notice, in a move to tackle rising domestic prices.
“This is happening when the export tonnages of all other major oils are under pressure: soya bean oil due to droughts in South America; rapeseed oil due to disastrous canola crops in Canada; and sunflower oil because of Russia’s war on Ukraine,”
This Indonesian decision is going to put fuel onto the inflation fire:
It announced the export ban on 22 April, until further notice, in a move to tackle rising domestic prices.
“This is happening when the export tonnages of all other major oils are under pressure: soya bean oil due to droughts in South America; rapeseed oil due to disastrous canola crops in Canada; and sunflower oil because of Russia’s war on Ukraine,”
Guardian
Not the biggest problem for the rich parts of the world, even if it causes some difficulties for food processors. A big problem for poor people in low and middle income countries though. As is the cost of wheat and petroleum products.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
That isn't what that research says. Its saying which tweets got amplified by the algorithm, but not why that happened and whom interacted with it to cause it.
You only have to look on twitter at any given day and some right wing person will tweet something stupid and the mob jump on it e.g. today was Andrew Pierce about home price increase...it was being amplified because a load of people were going look at this right wing idiot.
Owen Jones consistently does this, points out something and the mob pile on "interacts" with the tweet making it go trending. It isn't right wingers causing that trending to appear, but the metric will say ring wing person tweet got lots of engagement.
Yes but I'm not sure you are disagreeing. Even if that is the mechanism in most rather than some cases, and Twitter itself seems not to be sure, the net result is amplification of right wing views. The idea that Twitter is dominated by a shadowy left-wing cabal is not borne out. I suspect that idea is mostly due to a few prominent right-wingers like Donald Trump being barred over fomenting insurrection.
I am disagreeing. The research sounds horrendously flawed and says nothing about who dominants the twitter-sphere. A single right wing tweet getting lots of engagement, it can easily be because a lefty mob is enacting a pile on. That like saying the bloke in the town square is getting lots of engagement because the mob are screaming at him as soon as he speaks, doesn't mean that the town square is enabling fair and balanced discussion and is dressing to the direction of the bloke getting shouted down.
Now do I think twitter is as one sided as that, no. But you made the claim its "dresses right".
Here is the original research which looked at the amplification of tweets by MPs and their foreign equivalents. It found that tweets by Conservatives were amplified more than those by Labour and other parties whether or not government ministers were excluded (and similarly overseas). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
Again, you are missing the point. Engagement doesn't mean twitter dresses right. It means the algorithm is seeing a lot of people interacting with the tweet, and it being twitter it usually means negatively. Every day on twitter its #Boris....as in #BorisOut, #BorisLiar, #BorisKillingGrannies, etc etc etc.
Even if you are correct about the mechanism, the net result is the amplification of those right-wing tweets. In other words, the original (right-wing) tweets are promoted and presented to more people.
But to people who are against them.....complete with a massive stream of criticism. Its doesn't mean "twitter dresses right". Its like saying well the Guardian amplifies right wing because they report Boris comments, comment with 1000s of words of criticism.
I think its actually simpler. Oldies who traditionally lean right dominate the Facebook. The teenagers dominate the TikTok. The 18-35 year olds, and a certain demographic of uni educated etc etc etc, who traditionally lean left dominant on the (political) twitter.
No, Twitter amplifies right-wing comments to those of its users who have chosen to receive tweets ranked by relevance rather than by time. That is what the researchers examined. They also sought to control for the fact that governments make most of the news (which probably explains the alleged lefty bias of comedy panel shows) by checking if the exclusion of ministers' tweets evened things up.
What you seem to be saying might well be true, that attacking others' views generates engagement, and so Twitter will favour divisiveness (thus pleasing Russian trolls and their bosses) but that does not negate, and might not even explain, the above finding about amplification of right-wing views.
Its fairly easy to find right wing stuff on twitter. Looking at the Ruso-Ukranian war for example there are plenty of anti-semitic, pro-Putin posts, often with histories of other racism or misogyny. Many of these accounts seem to be from USA, Africa, or Latin America. The idea that they are suppressed is for the birds.
If Musk thinks that twitter will be improved by reducing any moderation then he has smoked a bit too much dope, and might as well put hus money in NFTs.
This Indonesian decision is going to put fuel onto the inflation fire:
It announced the export ban on 22 April, until further notice, in a move to tackle rising domestic prices.
“This is happening when the export tonnages of all other major oils are under pressure: soya bean oil due to droughts in South America; rapeseed oil due to disastrous canola crops in Canada; and sunflower oil because of Russia’s war on Ukraine,”
Guardian
Not the biggest problem for the rich parts of the world, even if it causes some difficulties for food processors. A big problem for poor people in low and middle income countries though. As is the cost of wheat and petroleum products.
The Russians are going to inflict the Holodomor on the third world. Worse, any betting they won't offer countries 'friendly' to them the fertilisers and food they need?
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
I deleted Whatsapp when F***book bought it. You can get me on Signal or iMessage - or SMS, email, maybe even the phone itself! The best thing about it - no longer getting thousands of ‘group’ messages.
LOL at the reaction to Musk buying Twitter. From reading the reports, it sounds like his plan to verify everyone has gone down badly with the already verified and their hordes of fake followers. Expect to see many of the banned people coming back too, and a lot of staff turnover among the ‘activist employees’.
Yes, Republicans buy shoes too, and that’s the huge opportunity for Twitter to grow.
I don't understand why anyone thinks @Heathener is a troll? Is it because they post things some people don't agree with?
Everything they've posted seems pretty sensible to me. This one has totally passed me by - just seems like a lot of unnecessary abuse and I am surprised the moderation team has not stepped in.
The moderation team has stepped in to share their own concerns about red flags, banned IP addresses etc
Posting something you don't agree with isn't trolling, I think some people sometimes are trolls who post things I agree with. Instead for me the trolling is the I know someone but can't say who nudge, nudge, wink, wink nonsense that is often written about.
If you have something to say then come out and say it. If you don't, then pretending you do or keeping it "anonymous" is just crap. Especially on a site like this.
Eh?
How is that trolling? They didn't want to identify their source, that's not trolling?
I don't want to identify my relative as it would be pretty obvious if I gave any details, who it is and who I am - that's not trolling. I call that respect.
Anonymising an anecdote about someone personally associated with you that we wouldn't know about isn't what I'm referring to.
Heathener has repeatedly claimed "sources" right at the top of the Conservative Party, claiming some quite outrageous things about those people etc that hasn't been substantiated by anything publicly available - that's what I view as trolling.
Its the same as if a right-winger claimed to have "sources" at the top of the Labour Party and kept making outrageous claims about Labour Party individuals etc that aren't substantiated by anything public. If someone right-wing kept making outrageous and unsubstantiated claims about Labour individuals because of their personal anonymous "sources" would you take that seriously, or think they're trolling?
Let's just clear up the misunderstanding and lies.
First, LIE NO.1 there was only one source not 'sources'.
Second, LIE No.2 I have only once used my source for a story on here, which was about misogynism in the parliamentary Conservative Party, as it happens.
Third, LIE No. 3 or MISUNDERSTANDING No. 1, I never once said that they were "at the top of the Conservative Party". Not a single time. And the reason I know that to be the case is because they aren't. I said, 'they are at the heart of Government'. Not the same thing and most people on here will now be able to work that out.
Fourth, LIE No. 4 'repeated outrageous and unsubstantiated claims'. Now you've gone from lying to hyperbole to a wild rant.
Fifth, the bare-faced Chutzpah of criticising anonymity when you yourself changed your name on here from P****P T*******N is truly remarkable.
I use a VPN whenever I use the internet. I am very concerned about analytics, data mining and tracking: euphemistically called 'cookies' as if they are something sweet and nice. Ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal I have gone anonymous online. I believe EVERYONE should think seriously about doing the same. I also came off all social media platforms.
For everyone for VPN's I can recommend Windscribe and FreeVPN. Both have been excellent.
For browsers I use the excellent Gener8 on privacy mode and DuckDuckGo for searching.
One wonders re: Elon Musk's motives re: the Twit-sphere? Pure altruism seems unlikely.
He wanted to own the libs.
$44BN to own the libs. Hope it’s worth it.
As recently as 2020 he was 'only' worth less than $40bn according to wiki. Not sure what the tipping point was which caused his wealth to shoot up 4x in a year.
Probably the value of Tesla stock as it’s done pretty well since 2020.
Yes, but what drove the sudden rise?
$5bn operating profit last quarter and a dizzying growth rate. People don't buy EVs, they buy Teslas. Case in point, now that our move to Switzerland is close to being canned (praise be to whoever or whatever higher power convinced my wife) we've begun looking for a car, the Model X is at the top of the shopping list.
You really don’t want a Model X - unless you see sh!tty build quality, huge panel gaps and unreliability of the minor electrics as positives because you’re part of the great Tesla cult.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
That isn't what that research says. Its saying which tweets got amplified by the algorithm, but not why that happened and whom interacted with it to cause it.
You only have to look on twitter at any given day and some right wing person will tweet something stupid and the mob jump on it e.g. today was Andrew Pierce about home price increase...it was being amplified because a load of people were going look at this right wing idiot.
Owen Jones consistently does this, points out something and the mob pile on "interacts" with the tweet making it go trending. It isn't right wingers causing that trending to appear, but the metric will say ring wing person tweet got lots of engagement.
Yes but I'm not sure you are disagreeing. Even if that is the mechanism in most rather than some cases, and Twitter itself seems not to be sure, the net result is amplification of right wing views. The idea that Twitter is dominated by a shadowy left-wing cabal is not borne out. I suspect that idea is mostly due to a few prominent right-wingers like Donald Trump being barred over fomenting insurrection.
I am disagreeing. The research sounds horrendously flawed and says nothing about who dominants the twitter-sphere. A single right wing tweet getting lots of engagement, it can easily be because a lefty mob is enacting a pile on. That like saying the bloke in the town square is getting lots of engagement because the mob are screaming at him as soon as he speaks, doesn't mean that the town square is enabling fair and balanced discussion and is dressing to the direction of the bloke getting shouted down.
Now do I think twitter is as one sided as that, no. But you made the claim its "dresses right".
Here is the original research which looked at the amplification of tweets by MPs and their foreign equivalents. It found that tweets by Conservatives were amplified more than those by Labour and other parties whether or not government ministers were excluded (and similarly overseas). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
Again, you are missing the point. Engagement doesn't mean twitter dresses right. It means the algorithm is seeing a lot of people interacting with the tweet, and it being twitter it usually means negatively. Every day on twitter its #Boris....as in #BorisOut, #BorisLiar, #BorisKillingGrannies, etc etc etc.
Even if you are correct about the mechanism, the net result is the amplification of those right-wing tweets. In other words, the original (right-wing) tweets are promoted and presented to more people.
But to people who are against them.....complete with a massive stream of criticism. Its doesn't mean "twitter dresses right". Its like saying well the Guardian amplifies right wing because they report Boris comments, comment with 1000s of words of criticism.
I think its actually simpler. Oldies who traditionally lean right dominate the Facebook. The teenagers dominate the TikTok. The 18-35 year olds, and a certain demographic of uni educated etc etc etc, who traditionally lean left dominant on the (political) twitter.
No, Twitter amplifies right-wing comments to those of its users who have chosen to receive tweets ranked by relevance rather than by time. That is what the researchers examined. They also sought to control for the fact that governments make most of the news (which probably explains the alleged lefty bias of comedy panel shows) by checking if the exclusion of ministers' tweets evened things up.
What you seem to be saying might well be true, that attacking others' views generates engagement, and so Twitter will favour divisiveness (thus pleasing Russian trolls and their bosses) but that does not negate, and might not even explain, the above finding about amplification of right-wing views.
Its fairly easy to find right wing stuff on twitter. Looking at the Ruso-Ukranian war for example there are plenty of anti-semitic, pro-Putin posts, often with histories of other racism or misogyny. Many of these accounts seem to be from USA, Africa, or Latin America. The idea that they are suppressed is for the birds.
If Musk thinks that twitter will be improved by reducing any moderation then he has smoked a bit too much dope, and might as well put hus money in NFTs.
Some level of moderation is needed for commercial reasons. If the site gets even more aggressive and unpleasant than it can be now, a lot of people - with followings large and small - will use it less. If it gets too bad, there may even be reputational issues in being seen to use it too much. However, Musk is probably not in it for the money.
I hope Twitter remains useable. I enjoy it a lot. I used to get involved in long back and forths with people but have realised these are entirely pointless. We are never going to agree and you cannot have a proper interaction when you are limited to 240 characters. But I am still a very frequent user as it's a great place to let off steam, to interact with people and to learn stuff from - those 240 characters are limiting, but they also help you distil your thoughts. The working day would drag a lot longer without it.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
If the moderation is too slackened then corporates will walk away because they don't want their ads next to some ranting neo-nazi from Alabama talking about buying more rope.
That's not how display advertising works, users see adverts most likely to get them to click. That Alabama rope buyer will see gun adverts, not tampon adverts.
Also Twitter is too big a platform to ignore. All of those brands which "abandoned" Facebook like PlayStation and Unilever are back. They make a big show of saying "look we're doing something" let a few weeks pass and quietly start buying up display space again.
Twitter, though, is one tenth the size of Facebook, and doesn't know anywhere near as much about its users.
Facebook knows (a) your age, (b) your sex, (c) where you live, (d) whether you recently broke up with your girlfriend, (d) etc. etc.
When we advertise on FB, we can say - OK, we want to show this advert to 22 to 28 year old men with college degrees who live in apartments in nice suburbs of Phoenix, who aren't yet married, whose car is no more than seven years old, and who don't have lots of photos in their gallery of them getting pissed in bars.
I am deadly serious; we can target that tightly. (Albeit in a State without invasive privacy laws.)
It means we can micro target messaging to people that are most likely to be great insurance customers.
Twitter, on the other hand, basically allows me to target by 'interest'. That's massively less useful.
Now, they have some decent ML models that about what you engage with and click. But the reality is that a Twitter user is worth a lot less than a Facebook user. (Especially as FB also reads your WhatsApp messages to target things even more.)
I will only pay $1.50-75 for a Twitter click, against probably $10-12 for an FB or Google one.
And that's the fundamental problem Twitter has: lots of engaged users (albeit far fewer than FB/Insta or Google), but the platform doesn't know that much about them, and that makes advertising on there significantly less valuable.
You overestimate the ability of FB to be able to target that demographic (same goes for YouTube etc). Their systems are far less proficient at targeting than they have been proclaiming and the recent changes in Apple ID privacy have been bringing that to the fore. The reason FB has got away for so long is that many marketing departments have been hooked into their spending without calculating its worth (with attribution models provided by Facebook telling them they should spend more money with err Facebook)
Hmmm:
I know conversion rates (click-to-policy) by channel (as well as loss ratios, churn, etc.) for my insurance business, and I can tell you that Google is number one for RoI, Facebook isn't bad at all, and other channels (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok) are simply not worth using. My conversions are so much lower, because I don't know that the person seeing my advert even owns a vehicle.
FB and Google, on the other hand, can guess that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
I'll back that view as well, just from talking to CMOs and CDOs from start ups we're invested in.
Ask them where they get their attribution models from, who provides the inputs and have they done proper econometric modelling. But ask them the first one first.
Also. That's not how it works. I use Kochava for attribution, and if someone clicks on a Google advert and goes on to buy the policy, I know exactly which advert they saw.
For literally every single one of my new customers I can see where they come from, with incredibly levels of granularity. So, I can look at J Smith, and see that he signed up today at 2:22pm, after clicking on a Google Search Advert for "auto insurance safer drivers". And I can do it the other way round too - I can see for each advertising campaign how many people clicked on it, how many downloaded the app, how many got through the welcome screen, etc.
Best of all, I can see that people who click on "cheap auto insurance" focused advertisements churn at much higher rates than those looking for "per mile".
I helped build out a campaign metric tracking product a few months ago looking into exactly this - which key words are performing best in terms of NDR and generating A quality leads.
The problem though is that you don’t know what drove the lead.
Let’s take Robert’s company. Joe hears from his neighbour that there is a great insurance company he should try out run by Bob Smithson . Joe thinks great, I’ll use him but I don’t know where to find him so he goes online to search the company, finds Bob’s Insurance (I’m sure that is not what it’s called), clicks through and buys.
According to yours / RCS’s view, it’s the Google ad that has driven the sale because they clicked through. But actually it wasn’t, it’s the neighbour telling Joe.
That’s certainly not true if everything and Search / FB definitely has their uses but, in many cases, there is over-attribution to online for sales.
Yes, you do. If someone's searching for your company name and click through you stick it down to some referral category. Who the hell is paying for display or other adverts on searches for their own company name, other than to block out competitors.
Organic hits and direct hits also feed into attribution modelling.
You have a view of online marketing based on 10 years ago.
Not really, considering I speak with a hell of a lot of CMOs and advertising people. Attribution is the big topic at the moment (with measurement) and there is a realisation the system is broken and needs to be repaired.
But don’t take my words for it. Read through FB’s comments at their last results, they are explicit about their measurement / targeting issues
Hmm, we're clearly speaking to different people. Click attribution is trivially easy, lead scoring is the big one as it directly impacts RoI. Companies are trying to reduce time spent on poor quality leads and better nurture high quality ones, figuring out which leads are high quality and then looking at which campaigns generated them, at what time of day, what locale etc... is the big one. That allows companies directly generate higher RoI based on running better campaigns and generating higher quality leads or fewer lower quality ones.
Companies which have good quality lead scoring models tend to be the ones that succeed as they aren't wasting resources on low value or high churn customers.
There are two types of ad spending, brand and activation. What you are talking about is entirely activation ie short term measures to bring in customers. While it works short term, the moment you stop, the leads fall off because no one remembers your brand. What you want is a mixture of the two, brand so people have a latent idea of who you are when they are thinking about making a particular purchase, and activation, to get them over the line. This is why I said, firms often start with online ad spend ie the activation part to get traction but, once they get to a certain stage, need brand because the ‘hamster wheel’ approach of constantly having to chase short term leads becomes too much.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
That isn't what that research says. Its saying which tweets got amplified by the algorithm, but not why that happened and whom interacted with it to cause it.
You only have to look on twitter at any given day and some right wing person will tweet something stupid and the mob jump on it e.g. today was Andrew Pierce about home price increase...it was being amplified because a load of people were going look at this right wing idiot.
Owen Jones consistently does this, points out something and the mob pile on "interacts" with the tweet making it go trending. It isn't right wingers causing that trending to appear, but the metric will say ring wing person tweet got lots of engagement.
Yes but I'm not sure you are disagreeing. Even if that is the mechanism in most rather than some cases, and Twitter itself seems not to be sure, the net result is amplification of right wing views. The idea that Twitter is dominated by a shadowy left-wing cabal is not borne out. I suspect that idea is mostly due to a few prominent right-wingers like Donald Trump being barred over fomenting insurrection.
I am disagreeing. The research sounds horrendously flawed and says nothing about who dominants the twitter-sphere. A single right wing tweet getting lots of engagement, it can easily be because a lefty mob is enacting a pile on. That like saying the bloke in the town square is getting lots of engagement because the mob are screaming at him as soon as he speaks, doesn't mean that the town square is enabling fair and balanced discussion and is dressing to the direction of the bloke getting shouted down.
Now do I think twitter is as one sided as that, no. But you made the claim its "dresses right".
Here is the original research which looked at the amplification of tweets by MPs and their foreign equivalents. It found that tweets by Conservatives were amplified more than those by Labour and other parties whether or not government ministers were excluded (and similarly overseas). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
Again, you are missing the point. Engagement doesn't mean twitter dresses right. It means the algorithm is seeing a lot of people interacting with the tweet, and it being twitter it usually means negatively. Every day on twitter its #Boris....as in #BorisOut, #BorisLiar, #BorisKillingGrannies, etc etc etc.
Even if you are correct about the mechanism, the net result is the amplification of those right-wing tweets. In other words, the original (right-wing) tweets are promoted and presented to more people.
But to people who are against them.....complete with a massive stream of criticism. Its doesn't mean "twitter dresses right". Its like saying well the Guardian amplifies right wing because they report Boris comments, comment with 1000s of words of criticism.
I think its actually simpler. Oldies who traditionally lean right dominate the Facebook. The teenagers dominate the TikTok. The 18-35 year olds, and a certain demographic of uni educated etc etc etc, who traditionally lean left dominant on the (political) twitter.
No, Twitter amplifies right-wing comments to those of its users who have chosen to receive tweets ranked by relevance rather than by time. That is what the researchers examined. They also sought to control for the fact that governments make most of the news (which probably explains the alleged lefty bias of comedy panel shows) by checking if the exclusion of ministers' tweets evened things up.
What you seem to be saying might well be true, that attacking others' views generates engagement, and so Twitter will favour divisiveness (thus pleasing Russian trolls and their bosses) but that does not negate, and might not even explain, the above finding about amplification of right-wing views.
Its fairly easy to find right wing stuff on twitter. Looking at the Ruso-Ukranian war for example there are plenty of anti-semitic, pro-Putin posts, often with histories of other racism or misogyny. Many of these accounts seem to be from USA, Africa, or Latin America. The idea that they are suppressed is for the birds.
If Musk thinks that twitter will be improved by reducing any moderation then he has smoked a bit too much dope, and might as well put hus money in NFTs.
I hope Twitter remains useable. I enjoy it a lot. I used to get involved in long back and forths with people but have realised these are entirely pointless. We are never going to agree and you cannot have a proper interaction when you are limited to 240 characters. But I am still a very frequent user as it's a great place to let off steam, to interact with people and to learn stuff from - those 240 characters are limiting, but they also help you distil your thoughts. The working day would drag a lot longer without it.
This is the perfect explanation as to why I came OFF twitter! It exemplifies for me so much that is wrong with the modern world. Reducing complex and nuanced topics to 240 characters is not distillation, it's over-simplification, distortion and bastardisation. It's made for simplistic people with simple binary minds: yes or no to topics which often have myriad shades of grey. Ranters and ravers who, as you say, then pile on in 'entirely pointless' back and forths. It's not designed for people who live in the centre but for what I have come to call, in the ilk of Piers Morgan, 'binary boneheads.'
The only time it is ever of use to me now is for polling and election results, and even those have to be treated with extreme caution. I can see Britain Elect tweets on polls without having an account but tbh these days the wiki opinion poll chart updates just as quickly. In fact they have yesterday's Redfield and Wilton poll up but Britain Elects missed it on their twitter feed.
One wonders re: Elon Musk's motives re: the Twit-sphere? Pure altruism seems unlikely.
He wanted to own the libs.
$44BN to own the libs. Hope it’s worth it.
As recently as 2020 he was 'only' worth less than $40bn according to wiki. Not sure what the tipping point was which caused his wealth to shoot up 4x in a year.
Probably the value of Tesla stock as it’s done pretty well since 2020.
Yes, but what drove the sudden rise?
$5bn operating profit last quarter and a dizzying growth rate. People don't buy EVs, they buy Teslas. Case in point, now that our move to Switzerland is close to being canned (praise be to whoever or whatever higher power convinced my wife) we've begun looking for a car, the Model X is at the top of the shopping list.
When my Fiesta got rescued from the end of a Highland landrover track after being slightly on fire, the man who picked me up desperately urged me never to buy a Tesla.
He seemed to make most of his living picking them up from the NC500.
Because they're unreliable, or because everyone's surprised that the north of Scotland isn't a massive hotbed of electric charging points?
Apparently the "important stuff" is fine but everything else breaks and has the car has to make its way to dealership to get fixed.
There are charging points at every overpriced b&b you can throw your wallet at up here. Even ones in the Hebrides.
On pb they still think everyone North of Glasgow runs about in kilts and use horses for transport
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
I deleted Whatsapp when F***book bought it. You can get me on Signal or iMessage - or SMS, email, maybe even the phone itself! The best thing about it - no longer getting thousands of ‘group’ messages.
LOL at the reaction to Musk buying Twitter. From reading the reports, it sounds like his plan to verify everyone has gone down badly with the already verified and their hordes of fake followers. Expect to see many of the banned people coming back too, and a lot of staff turnover among the ‘activist employees’.
Yes, Republicans buy shoes too, and that’s the huge opportunity for Twitter to grow.
With you 100%.
I tried Signal but now use iMessage and Telegram although I have some concerns about privacy with the latter. And for my friends in Thailand I use Line.
So I use those as message mediums but have come off all other forms of public social media: Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp. Deleted all accounts.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Western arms shipments to Ukraine mean Nato is "in essence engaged in war with Russia" and there is "considerable" risk of the conflict going nuclear
This is now a settled theme from Russia, cf
A senior commentator on state television stated recently that any attempt to send NATO peacekeepers to Ukraine would be a casus belli, provoking war between Russia and NATO. “To win this war,” he blandly explained, “whether we like it or not, we will have to use tactical nuclear weapons in the theatre of operations. This will then entail the use of powerful strategic nuclear weapons.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Western arms shipments to Ukraine mean Nato is "in essence engaged in war with Russia" and there is "considerable" risk of the conflict going nuclear
This is now a settled theme from Russia, cf
A senior commentator on state television stated recently that any attempt to send NATO peacekeepers to Ukraine would be a casus belli, provoking war between Russia and NATO. “To win this war,” he blandly explained, “whether we like it or not, we will have to use tactical nuclear weapons in the theatre of operations. This will then entail the use of powerful strategic nuclear weapons.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Western arms shipments to Ukraine mean Nato is "in essence engaged in war with Russia" and there is "considerable" risk of the conflict going nuclear
This is now a settled theme from Russia,.
Tbh I'm amazed they haven't said this from the outset, and it's part of the reason why I think we've been a bit disingenuous about the No Fly Zone. We have drawn our own line by saying that it's fine to supply tons of military equipment, intelligence and, even, special 'advisors' (SAS) to Ukraine but it's not fine to install a NFZ. 95% of people on here have gone along with this, often vociferously. They've told themselves that the one will help Ukraine but won't escalate it but the other would lead to WWIII and Armageddon.
But it's cant and hypocrisy basically, isn't it? If we're going to support Ukraine, support Ukraine. We should have backed Zelensky's request and stood up to Putin. He asked for a No Fly Zone and we turned him down. The result has been the pulverisation of an entire country and her people. Some support.
If an 'inside' story appeared about the Conservative Party in the Daily Mirror or The Guardian would you be inclined to treat it with a pinch of salt?
The attacks on Starmer's leadership in the right wing press are undoubtedly increasing. Strangely enough these are coming at a time when Starmer is getting leads over Johnson in best PM polling that neither Ed Miliband nor Jeremy Corbyn came close to matching. I may be wrong, but I don't think either ever led any one of Cameron, May or Johnson for best PM. Starmer now does it regularly.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
That isn't what that research says. Its saying which tweets got amplified by the algorithm, but not why that happened and whom interacted with it to cause it.
You only have to look on twitter at any given day and some right wing person will tweet something stupid and the mob jump on it e.g. today was Andrew Pierce about home price increase...it was being amplified because a load of people were going look at this right wing idiot.
Owen Jones consistently does this, points out something and the mob pile on "interacts" with the tweet making it go trending. It isn't right wingers causing that trending to appear, but the metric will say ring wing person tweet got lots of engagement.
Yes but I'm not sure you are disagreeing. Even if that is the mechanism in most rather than some cases, and Twitter itself seems not to be sure, the net result is amplification of right wing views. The idea that Twitter is dominated by a shadowy left-wing cabal is not borne out. I suspect that idea is mostly due to a few prominent right-wingers like Donald Trump being barred over fomenting insurrection.
I am disagreeing. The research sounds horrendously flawed and says nothing about who dominants the twitter-sphere. A single right wing tweet getting lots of engagement, it can easily be because a lefty mob is enacting a pile on. That like saying the bloke in the town square is getting lots of engagement because the mob are screaming at him as soon as he speaks, doesn't mean that the town square is enabling fair and balanced discussion and is dressing to the direction of the bloke getting shouted down.
Now do I think twitter is as one sided as that, no. But you made the claim its "dresses right".
Here is the original research which looked at the amplification of tweets by MPs and their foreign equivalents. It found that tweets by Conservatives were amplified more than those by Labour and other parties whether or not government ministers were excluded (and similarly overseas). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
Again, you are missing the point. Engagement doesn't mean twitter dresses right. It means the algorithm is seeing a lot of people interacting with the tweet, and it being twitter it usually means negatively. Every day on twitter its #Boris....as in #BorisOut, #BorisLiar, #BorisKillingGrannies, etc etc etc.
Even if you are correct about the mechanism, the net result is the amplification of those right-wing tweets. In other words, the original (right-wing) tweets are promoted and presented to more people.
But to people who are against them.....complete with a massive stream of criticism. Its doesn't mean "twitter dresses right". Its like saying well the Guardian amplifies right wing because they report Boris comments, comment with 1000s of words of criticism.
I think its actually simpler. Oldies who traditionally lean right dominate the Facebook. The teenagers dominate the TikTok. The 18-35 year olds, and a certain demographic of uni educated etc etc etc, who traditionally lean left dominant on the (political) twitter.
No, Twitter amplifies right-wing comments to those of its users who have chosen to receive tweets ranked by relevance rather than by time. That is what the researchers examined. They also sought to control for the fact that governments make most of the news (which probably explains the alleged lefty bias of comedy panel shows) by checking if the exclusion of ministers' tweets evened things up.
What you seem to be saying might well be true, that attacking others' views generates engagement, and so Twitter will favour divisiveness (thus pleasing Russian trolls and their bosses) but that does not negate, and might not even explain, the above finding about amplification of right-wing views.
Its fairly easy to find right wing stuff on twitter. Looking at the Ruso-Ukranian war for example there are plenty of anti-semitic, pro-Putin posts, often with histories of other racism or misogyny. Many of these accounts seem to be from USA, Africa, or Latin America. The idea that they are suppressed is for the birds.
If Musk thinks that twitter will be improved by reducing any moderation then he has smoked a bit too much dope, and might as well put hus money in NFTs.
I hope Twitter remains useable. I enjoy it a lot. I used to get involved in long back and forths with people but have realised these are entirely pointless. We are never going to agree and you cannot have a proper interaction when you are limited to 240 characters. But I am still a very frequent user as it's a great place to let off steam, to interact with people and to learn stuff from - those 240 characters are limiting, but they also help you distil your thoughts. The working day would drag a lot longer without it.
This is the perfect explanation as to why I came OFF twitter! It exemplifies for me so much that is wrong with the modern world. Reducing complex and nuanced topics to 240 characters is not distillation, it's over-simplification, distortion and bastardisation. It's made for simplistic people with simple binary minds: yes or no to topics which often have myriad shades of grey. Ranters and ravers who, as you say, then pile on in 'entirely pointless' back and forths. It's not designed for people who live in the centre but for what I have come to call, in the ilk of Piers Morgan, 'binary boneheads.'
The only time it is ever of use to me now is for polling and election results, and even those have to be treated with extreme caution. I can see Britain Elect tweets on polls without having an account but tbh these days the wiki opinion poll chart updates just as quickly. In fact they have yesterday's Redfield and Wilton poll up but Britain Elects missed it on their twitter feed.
I don't see myself as a simplistic person with a binary mind. But maybe I am! The first people with the R&W poll yesterday were R&W on Twitter. The headline results and the full polling were all available on the dot of 5.00 pm.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
That isn't what that research says. Its saying which tweets got amplified by the algorithm, but not why that happened and whom interacted with it to cause it.
You only have to look on twitter at any given day and some right wing person will tweet something stupid and the mob jump on it e.g. today was Andrew Pierce about home price increase...it was being amplified because a load of people were going look at this right wing idiot.
Owen Jones consistently does this, points out something and the mob pile on "interacts" with the tweet making it go trending. It isn't right wingers causing that trending to appear, but the metric will say ring wing person tweet got lots of engagement.
Yes but I'm not sure you are disagreeing. Even if that is the mechanism in most rather than some cases, and Twitter itself seems not to be sure, the net result is amplification of right wing views. The idea that Twitter is dominated by a shadowy left-wing cabal is not borne out. I suspect that idea is mostly due to a few prominent right-wingers like Donald Trump being barred over fomenting insurrection.
I am disagreeing. The research sounds horrendously flawed and says nothing about who dominants the twitter-sphere. A single right wing tweet getting lots of engagement, it can easily be because a lefty mob is enacting a pile on. That like saying the bloke in the town square is getting lots of engagement because the mob are screaming at him as soon as he speaks, doesn't mean that the town square is enabling fair and balanced discussion and is dressing to the direction of the bloke getting shouted down.
Now do I think twitter is as one sided as that, no. But you made the claim its "dresses right".
Here is the original research which looked at the amplification of tweets by MPs and their foreign equivalents. It found that tweets by Conservatives were amplified more than those by Labour and other parties whether or not government ministers were excluded (and similarly overseas). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
Again, you are missing the point. Engagement doesn't mean twitter dresses right. It means the algorithm is seeing a lot of people interacting with the tweet, and it being twitter it usually means negatively. Every day on twitter its #Boris....as in #BorisOut, #BorisLiar, #BorisKillingGrannies, etc etc etc.
Even if you are correct about the mechanism, the net result is the amplification of those right-wing tweets. In other words, the original (right-wing) tweets are promoted and presented to more people.
But to people who are against them.....complete with a massive stream of criticism. Its doesn't mean "twitter dresses right". Its like saying well the Guardian amplifies right wing because they report Boris comments, comment with 1000s of words of criticism.
I think its actually simpler. Oldies who traditionally lean right dominate the Facebook. The teenagers dominate the TikTok. The 18-35 year olds, and a certain demographic of uni educated etc etc etc, who traditionally lean left dominant on the (political) twitter.
No, Twitter amplifies right-wing comments to those of its users who have chosen to receive tweets ranked by relevance rather than by time. That is what the researchers examined. They also sought to control for the fact that governments make most of the news (which probably explains the alleged lefty bias of comedy panel shows) by checking if the exclusion of ministers' tweets evened things up.
What you seem to be saying might well be true, that attacking others' views generates engagement, and so Twitter will favour divisiveness (thus pleasing Russian trolls and their bosses) but that does not negate, and might not even explain, the above finding about amplification of right-wing views.
Its fairly easy to find right wing stuff on twitter. Looking at the Ruso-Ukranian war for example there are plenty of anti-semitic, pro-Putin posts, often with histories of other racism or misogyny. Many of these accounts seem to be from USA, Africa, or Latin America. The idea that they are suppressed is for the birds.
If Musk thinks that twitter will be improved by reducing any moderation then he has smoked a bit too much dope, and might as well put hus money in NFTs.
I hope Twitter remains useable. I enjoy it a lot. I used to get involved in long back and forths with people but have realised these are entirely pointless. We are never going to agree and you cannot have a proper interaction when you are limited to 240 characters. But I am still a very frequent user as it's a great place to let off steam, to interact with people and to learn stuff from - those 240 characters are limiting, but they also help you distil your thoughts. The working day would drag a lot longer without it.
This is the perfect explanation as to why I came OFF twitter! It exemplifies for me so much that is wrong with the modern world. Reducing complex and nuanced topics to 240 characters is not distillation, it's over-simplification, distortion and bastardisation. It's made for simplistic people with simple binary minds: yes or no to topics which often have myriad shades of grey. Ranters and ravers who, as you say, then pile on in 'entirely pointless' back and forths. It's not designed for people who live in the centre but for what I have come to call, in the ilk of Piers Morgan, 'binary boneheads.'
The only time it is ever of use to me now is for polling and election results, and even those have to be treated with extreme caution. I can see Britain Elect tweets on polls without having an account but tbh these days the wiki opinion poll chart updates just as quickly. In fact they have yesterday's Redfield and Wilton poll up but Britain Elects missed it on their twitter feed.
I don't see myself as a simplistic person with a binary mind. But maybe I am! The first people with the R&W poll yesterday were R&W on Twitter. The headline results and the full polling were all available on the dot of 5.00 pm.
Yes apologies, I didn't mean to imply you are. That was infelicitously expressed by me, sorry. You made clear that you find those kinds of back and forths 'entirely pointless'.
The kind of pile-ons you see from both Right and Left are beyond depressing. A dreadful place imho for anyone who believes that a lot of things in life are multi-faceted, complex and nuanced.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Western arms shipments to Ukraine mean Nato is "in essence engaged in war with Russia" and there is "considerable" risk of the conflict going nuclear
This is now a settled theme from Russia,.
Tbh I'm amazed they haven't said this from the outset, and it's part of the reason why I think we've being really disingenuous about the No Fly Zone. We have drawn our own line by saying that it's fine to supply tons of military equipment, intelligence and, even, special 'advisors' (SAS) to Ukraine but it's not fine to install a NFZ. 95% of people on here have gone along with this, often vociferously. They've told themselves that the one will help Ukraine but won't escalate it but the other would lead to WWIII and Armageddon.
But it's cant and hypocrisy basically, isn't it? If we're going to support Ukraine, bloody well support Ukraine. We should have backed Zelensky's request and stood up to Putin.
Just my opinion. Don't flame me.
Not going to flame you, but consider this: all but the most psychopathic criminals retain a demented sense of justice, a point quite neatly illustrated by monty python's piranha brothers who nail someone's head to the floor "because he had transgressed the unwritten code." Putin's unwritten code includes no nfz.
Or of course, he is bluffing and we only think it does. But don't fall into the narrative of Stand up to the bully, give Ivan a bloody nose and he will always cave in to true British grit. That is a school story and there's no nukes in schools.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
That isn't what that research says. Its saying which tweets got amplified by the algorithm, but not why that happened and whom interacted with it to cause it.
You only have to look on twitter at any given day and some right wing person will tweet something stupid and the mob jump on it e.g. today was Andrew Pierce about home price increase...it was being amplified because a load of people were going look at this right wing idiot.
Owen Jones consistently does this, points out something and the mob pile on "interacts" with the tweet making it go trending. It isn't right wingers causing that trending to appear, but the metric will say ring wing person tweet got lots of engagement.
Yes but I'm not sure you are disagreeing. Even if that is the mechanism in most rather than some cases, and Twitter itself seems not to be sure, the net result is amplification of right wing views. The idea that Twitter is dominated by a shadowy left-wing cabal is not borne out. I suspect that idea is mostly due to a few prominent right-wingers like Donald Trump being barred over fomenting insurrection.
I am disagreeing. The research sounds horrendously flawed and says nothing about who dominants the twitter-sphere. A single right wing tweet getting lots of engagement, it can easily be because a lefty mob is enacting a pile on. That like saying the bloke in the town square is getting lots of engagement because the mob are screaming at him as soon as he speaks, doesn't mean that the town square is enabling fair and balanced discussion and is dressing to the direction of the bloke getting shouted down.
Now do I think twitter is as one sided as that, no. But you made the claim its "dresses right".
Here is the original research which looked at the amplification of tweets by MPs and their foreign equivalents. It found that tweets by Conservatives were amplified more than those by Labour and other parties whether or not government ministers were excluded (and similarly overseas). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
Again, you are missing the point. Engagement doesn't mean twitter dresses right. It means the algorithm is seeing a lot of people interacting with the tweet, and it being twitter it usually means negatively. Every day on twitter its #Boris....as in #BorisOut, #BorisLiar, #BorisKillingGrannies, etc etc etc.
Even if you are correct about the mechanism, the net result is the amplification of those right-wing tweets. In other words, the original (right-wing) tweets are promoted and presented to more people.
But to people who are against them.....complete with a massive stream of criticism. Its doesn't mean "twitter dresses right". Its like saying well the Guardian amplifies right wing because they report Boris comments, comment with 1000s of words of criticism.
I think its actually simpler. Oldies who traditionally lean right dominate the Facebook. The teenagers dominate the TikTok. The 18-35 year olds, and a certain demographic of uni educated etc etc etc, who traditionally lean left dominant on the (political) twitter.
No, Twitter amplifies right-wing comments to those of its users who have chosen to receive tweets ranked by relevance rather than by time. That is what the researchers examined. They also sought to control for the fact that governments make most of the news (which probably explains the alleged lefty bias of comedy panel shows) by checking if the exclusion of ministers' tweets evened things up.
What you seem to be saying might well be true, that attacking others' views generates engagement, and so Twitter will favour divisiveness (thus pleasing Russian trolls and their bosses) but that does not negate, and might not even explain, the above finding about amplification of right-wing views.
Its fairly easy to find right wing stuff on twitter. Looking at the Ruso-Ukranian war for example there are plenty of anti-semitic, pro-Putin posts, often with histories of other racism or misogyny. Many of these accounts seem to be from USA, Africa, or Latin America. The idea that they are suppressed is for the birds.
If Musk thinks that twitter will be improved by reducing any moderation then he has smoked a bit too much dope, and might as well put hus money in NFTs.
I hope Twitter remains useable. I enjoy it a lot. I used to get involved in long back and forths with people but have realised these are entirely pointless. We are never going to agree and you cannot have a proper interaction when you are limited to 240 characters. But I am still a very frequent user as it's a great place to let off steam, to interact with people and to learn stuff from - those 240 characters are limiting, but they also help you distil your thoughts. The working day would drag a lot longer without it.
This is the perfect explanation as to why I came OFF twitter! It exemplifies for me so much that is wrong with the modern world. Reducing complex and nuanced topics to 240 characters is not distillation, it's over-simplification, distortion and bastardisation. It's made for simplistic people with simple binary minds: yes or no to topics which often have myriad shades of grey. Ranters and ravers who, as you say, then pile on in 'entirely pointless' back and forths. It's not designed for people who live in the centre but for what I have come to call, in the ilk of Piers Morgan, 'binary boneheads.'
The only time it is ever of use to me now is for polling and election results, and even those have to be treated with extreme caution. I can see Britain Elect tweets on polls without having an account but tbh these days the wiki opinion poll chart updates just as quickly. In fact they have yesterday's Redfield and Wilton poll up but Britain Elects missed it on their twitter feed.
I don't see myself as a simplistic person with a binary mind. But maybe I am! The first people with the R&W poll yesterday were R&W on Twitter. The headline results and the full polling were all available on the dot of 5.00 pm.
Quite. As Leon keeps pointing out it is unbeatable for news of plague in faraway countries, and footage of Ukrainian tractors towing tanks. Treat is purely as a news and rumour source and stay a mile away from any expression of opinion and it rocks.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Western arms shipments to Ukraine mean Nato is "in essence engaged in war with Russia" and there is "considerable" risk of the conflict going nuclear
This is now a settled theme from Russia, cf
A senior commentator on state television stated recently that any attempt to send NATO peacekeepers to Ukraine would be a casus belli, provoking war between Russia and NATO. “To win this war,” he blandly explained, “whether we like it or not, we will have to use tactical nuclear weapons in the theatre of operations. This will then entail the use of powerful strategic nuclear weapons.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Western arms shipments to Ukraine mean Nato is "in essence engaged in war with Russia" and there is "considerable" risk of the conflict going nuclear
This is now a settled theme from Russia,.
Tbh I'm amazed they haven't said this from the outset, and it's part of the reason why I think we've being really disingenuous about the No Fly Zone. We have drawn our own line by saying that it's fine to supply tons of military equipment, intelligence and, even, special 'advisors' (SAS) to Ukraine but it's not fine to install a NFZ. 95% of people on here have gone along with this, often vociferously. They've told themselves that the one will help Ukraine but won't escalate it but the other would lead to WWIII and Armageddon.
But it's cant and hypocrisy basically, isn't it? If we're going to support Ukraine, bloody well support Ukraine. We should have backed Zelensky's request and stood up to Putin.
Just my opinion. Don't flame me.
Not going to flame you, but consider this: all but the most psychopathic criminals retain a demented sense of justice, a point quite neatly illustrated by monty python's piranha brothers who nail someone's head to the floor "because he had transgressed the unwritten code." Putin's unwritten code includes no nfz.
Or of course, he is bluffing and we only think it does. But don't fall into the narrative of Stand up to the bully, give Ivan a bloody nose and he will always cave in to true British grit. That is a school story and there's no nukes in schools.
If you believe Putin is mad enough to use nukes now, why do you believe he'd suddenly become sane and not threaten to use them after he gets what he wants, and Russia is still a sh*thole and not the world leader it is in his head? Especially as the threat just worked?
It is little to do with 'standing up to a bully'; it is trying to staunch the threat whilst we can.
Sue Gray expects to complete her report into Covid law-breaking parties across Westminster at the end of May at the earliest, the Guardian has been told.
Sources said that the senior civil servant, who for months has been forced to sit on her findings about illegal gatherings while Scotland Yard carries out its own inquiry, believes the police investigation could drag on for several more weeks.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
That isn't what that research says. Its saying which tweets got amplified by the algorithm, but not why that happened and whom interacted with it to cause it.
You only have to look on twitter at any given day and some right wing person will tweet something stupid and the mob jump on it e.g. today was Andrew Pierce about home price increase...it was being amplified because a load of people were going look at this right wing idiot.
Owen Jones consistently does this, points out something and the mob pile on "interacts" with the tweet making it go trending. It isn't right wingers causing that trending to appear, but the metric will say ring wing person tweet got lots of engagement.
Yes but I'm not sure you are disagreeing. Even if that is the mechanism in most rather than some cases, and Twitter itself seems not to be sure, the net result is amplification of right wing views. The idea that Twitter is dominated by a shadowy left-wing cabal is not borne out. I suspect that idea is mostly due to a few prominent right-wingers like Donald Trump being barred over fomenting insurrection.
I am disagreeing. The research sounds horrendously flawed and says nothing about who dominants the twitter-sphere. A single right wing tweet getting lots of engagement, it can easily be because a lefty mob is enacting a pile on. That like saying the bloke in the town square is getting lots of engagement because the mob are screaming at him as soon as he speaks, doesn't mean that the town square is enabling fair and balanced discussion and is dressing to the direction of the bloke getting shouted down.
Now do I think twitter is as one sided as that, no. But you made the claim its "dresses right".
Here is the original research which looked at the amplification of tweets by MPs and their foreign equivalents. It found that tweets by Conservatives were amplified more than those by Labour and other parties whether or not government ministers were excluded (and similarly overseas). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
Again, you are missing the point. Engagement doesn't mean twitter dresses right. It means the algorithm is seeing a lot of people interacting with the tweet, and it being twitter it usually means negatively. Every day on twitter its #Boris....as in #BorisOut, #BorisLiar, #BorisKillingGrannies, etc etc etc.
Even if you are correct about the mechanism, the net result is the amplification of those right-wing tweets. In other words, the original (right-wing) tweets are promoted and presented to more people.
But to people who are against them.....complete with a massive stream of criticism. Its doesn't mean "twitter dresses right". Its like saying well the Guardian amplifies right wing because they report Boris comments, comment with 1000s of words of criticism.
I think its actually simpler. Oldies who traditionally lean right dominate the Facebook. The teenagers dominate the TikTok. The 18-35 year olds, and a certain demographic of uni educated etc etc etc, who traditionally lean left dominant on the (political) twitter.
No, Twitter amplifies right-wing comments to those of its users who have chosen to receive tweets ranked by relevance rather than by time. That is what the researchers examined. They also sought to control for the fact that governments make most of the news (which probably explains the alleged lefty bias of comedy panel shows) by checking if the exclusion of ministers' tweets evened things up.
What you seem to be saying might well be true, that attacking others' views generates engagement, and so Twitter will favour divisiveness (thus pleasing Russian trolls and their bosses) but that does not negate, and might not even explain, the above finding about amplification of right-wing views.
Its fairly easy to find right wing stuff on twitter. Looking at the Ruso-Ukranian war for example there are plenty of anti-semitic, pro-Putin posts, often with histories of other racism or misogyny. Many of these accounts seem to be from USA, Africa, or Latin America. The idea that they are suppressed is for the birds.
If Musk thinks that twitter will be improved by reducing any moderation then he has smoked a bit too much dope, and might as well put hus money in NFTs.
I hope Twitter remains useable. I enjoy it a lot. I used to get involved in long back and forths with people but have realised these are entirely pointless. We are never going to agree and you cannot have a proper interaction when you are limited to 240 characters. But I am still a very frequent user as it's a great place to let off steam, to interact with people and to learn stuff from - those 240 characters are limiting, but they also help you distil your thoughts. The working day would drag a lot longer without it.
This is the perfect explanation as to why I came OFF twitter! It exemplifies for me so much that is wrong with the modern world. Reducing complex and nuanced topics to 240 characters is not distillation, it's over-simplification, distortion and bastardisation. It's made for simplistic people with simple binary minds: yes or no to topics which often have myriad shades of grey. Ranters and ravers who, as you say, then pile on in 'entirely pointless' back and forths. It's not designed for people who live in the centre but for what I have come to call, in the ilk of Piers Morgan, 'binary boneheads.'
The only time it is ever of use to me now is for polling and election results, and even those have to be treated with extreme caution. I can see Britain Elect tweets on polls without having an account but tbh these days the wiki opinion poll chart updates just as quickly. In fact they have yesterday's Redfield and Wilton poll up but Britain Elects missed it on their twitter feed.
I don't see myself as a simplistic person with a binary mind. But maybe I am! The first people with the R&W poll yesterday were R&W on Twitter. The headline results and the full polling were all available on the dot of 5.00 pm.
Yes apologies, I didn't mean to imply you are. That was infelicitously expressed by me, sorry. You made clear that you find those kinds of back and forths 'entirely pointless'.
The kind of pile-ons you see from both Right and Left are beyond depressing. A dreadful place imho for anyone who believes that a lot of things in life are multi-faceted, complex and nuanced.
Ha, ha - don't worry about it. I was teasing you and me! The pile-ons are by far the worse part of Twitter. The second worse are the people who believe that Twitter likes and Retweets matter. If Musk's changes end up amplifying either he will drive a lot of users away.
On political balance, I have no idea. My interactions tend to be with people who are not at the extremes: more left than right, but that's my politics. I get a lot of value from reading and exchanging views with people on the right, too. The mute and block buttons are very helpful for the loons. But it's not all politics. I follow a lot of people who post paintings, who write about food and drink, who cover countries I am particularly interested in and so on. I got a load of interesting stuff fed to me on a daily basis. Plus, there's the sport. The positive of Twitter far outweighs the negative at the moment. I hope that doesn't change.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Western arms shipments to Ukraine mean Nato is "in essence engaged in war with Russia" and there is "considerable" risk of the conflict going nuclear
This is now a settled theme from Russia,.
Tbh I'm amazed they haven't said this from the outset, and it's part of the reason why I think we've being really disingenuous about the No Fly Zone. We have drawn our own line by saying that it's fine to supply tons of military equipment, intelligence and, even, special 'advisors' (SAS) to Ukraine but it's not fine to install a NFZ. 95% of people on here have gone along with this, often vociferously. They've told themselves that the one will help Ukraine but won't escalate it but the other would lead to WWIII and Armageddon.
But it's cant and hypocrisy basically, isn't it? If we're going to support Ukraine, bloody well support Ukraine. We should have backed Zelensky's request and stood up to Putin.
Just my opinion. Don't flame me.
Not going to flame you, but consider this: all but the most psychopathic criminals retain a demented sense of justice, a point quite neatly illustrated by monty python's piranha brothers who nail someone's head to the floor "because he had transgressed the unwritten code." Putin's unwritten code includes no nfz.
Or of course, he is bluffing and we only think it does. But don't fall into the narrative of Stand up to the bully, give Ivan a bloody nose and he will always cave in to true British grit. That is a school story and there's no nukes in schools.
If you believe Putin is mad enough to use nukes now, why do you believe he'd suddenly become sane and not threaten to use them after he gets what he wants, and Russia is still a sh*thole and not the world leader it is in his head? Especially as the threat just worked?
It is little to do with 'standing up to a bully'; it is trying to staunch the threat whilst we can.
Again, metaphors are not your friend. You can't "staunch" a Sarmat ICBM.
And I come back to my Piranha brothers point. Even the criminally violent tend to make and stick to arbitrary rules. There is no reason for an insane Putin to even recognise the existence of NATO, but it seems he does.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Western arms shipments to Ukraine mean Nato is "in essence engaged in war with Russia" and there is "considerable" risk of the conflict going nuclear
This is now a settled theme from Russia, cf
A senior commentator on state television stated recently that any attempt to send NATO peacekeepers to Ukraine would be a casus belli, provoking war between Russia and NATO. “To win this war,” he blandly explained, “whether we like it or not, we will have to use tactical nuclear weapons in the theatre of operations. This will then entail the use of powerful strategic nuclear weapons.”
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
That isn't what that research says. Its saying which tweets got amplified by the algorithm, but not why that happened and whom interacted with it to cause it.
You only have to look on twitter at any given day and some right wing person will tweet something stupid and the mob jump on it e.g. today was Andrew Pierce about home price increase...it was being amplified because a load of people were going look at this right wing idiot.
Owen Jones consistently does this, points out something and the mob pile on "interacts" with the tweet making it go trending. It isn't right wingers causing that trending to appear, but the metric will say ring wing person tweet got lots of engagement.
Yes but I'm not sure you are disagreeing. Even if that is the mechanism in most rather than some cases, and Twitter itself seems not to be sure, the net result is amplification of right wing views. The idea that Twitter is dominated by a shadowy left-wing cabal is not borne out. I suspect that idea is mostly due to a few prominent right-wingers like Donald Trump being barred over fomenting insurrection.
I am disagreeing. The research sounds horrendously flawed and says nothing about who dominants the twitter-sphere. A single right wing tweet getting lots of engagement, it can easily be because a lefty mob is enacting a pile on. That like saying the bloke in the town square is getting lots of engagement because the mob are screaming at him as soon as he speaks, doesn't mean that the town square is enabling fair and balanced discussion and is dressing to the direction of the bloke getting shouted down.
Now do I think twitter is as one sided as that, no. But you made the claim its "dresses right".
Here is the original research which looked at the amplification of tweets by MPs and their foreign equivalents. It found that tweets by Conservatives were amplified more than those by Labour and other parties whether or not government ministers were excluded (and similarly overseas). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
Again, you are missing the point. Engagement doesn't mean twitter dresses right. It means the algorithm is seeing a lot of people interacting with the tweet, and it being twitter it usually means negatively. Every day on twitter its #Boris....as in #BorisOut, #BorisLiar, #BorisKillingGrannies, etc etc etc.
Even if you are correct about the mechanism, the net result is the amplification of those right-wing tweets. In other words, the original (right-wing) tweets are promoted and presented to more people.
But to people who are against them.....complete with a massive stream of criticism. Its doesn't mean "twitter dresses right". Its like saying well the Guardian amplifies right wing because they report Boris comments, comment with 1000s of words of criticism.
I think its actually simpler. Oldies who traditionally lean right dominate the Facebook. The teenagers dominate the TikTok. The 18-35 year olds, and a certain demographic of uni educated etc etc etc, who traditionally lean left dominant on the (political) twitter.
No, Twitter amplifies right-wing comments to those of its users who have chosen to receive tweets ranked by relevance rather than by time. That is what the researchers examined. They also sought to control for the fact that governments make most of the news (which probably explains the alleged lefty bias of comedy panel shows) by checking if the exclusion of ministers' tweets evened things up.
What you seem to be saying might well be true, that attacking others' views generates engagement, and so Twitter will favour divisiveness (thus pleasing Russian trolls and their bosses) but that does not negate, and might not even explain, the above finding about amplification of right-wing views.
Its fairly easy to find right wing stuff on twitter. Looking at the Ruso-Ukranian war for example there are plenty of anti-semitic, pro-Putin posts, often with histories of other racism or misogyny. Many of these accounts seem to be from USA, Africa, or Latin America. The idea that they are suppressed is for the birds.
If Musk thinks that twitter will be improved by reducing any moderation then he has smoked a bit too much dope, and might as well put hus money in NFTs.
I hope Twitter remains useable. I enjoy it a lot. I used to get involved in long back and forths with people but have realised these are entirely pointless. We are never going to agree and you cannot have a proper interaction when you are limited to 240 characters. But I am still a very frequent user as it's a great place to let off steam, to interact with people and to learn stuff from - those 240 characters are limiting, but they also help you distil your thoughts. The working day would drag a lot longer without it.
This is the perfect explanation as to why I came OFF twitter! It exemplifies for me so much that is wrong with the modern world. Reducing complex and nuanced topics to 240 characters is not distillation, it's over-simplification, distortion and bastardisation. It's made for simplistic people with simple binary minds: yes or no to topics which often have myriad shades of grey. Ranters and ravers who, as you say, then pile on in 'entirely pointless' back and forths. It's not designed for people who live in the centre but for what I have come to call, in the ilk of Piers Morgan, 'binary boneheads.'
The only time it is ever of use to me now is for polling and election results, and even those have to be treated with extreme caution. I can see Britain Elect tweets on polls without having an account but tbh these days the wiki opinion poll chart updates just as quickly. In fact they have yesterday's Redfield and Wilton poll up but Britain Elects missed it on their twitter feed.
I don't see myself as a simplistic person with a binary mind. But maybe I am! The first people with the R&W poll yesterday were R&W on Twitter. The headline results and the full polling were all available on the dot of 5.00 pm.
Yes apologies, I didn't mean to imply you are. That was infelicitously expressed by me, sorry. You made clear that you find those kinds of back and forths 'entirely pointless'.
The kind of pile-ons you see from both Right and Left are beyond depressing. A dreadful place imho for anyone who believes that a lot of things in life are multi-faceted, complex and nuanced.
Ha, ha - don't worry about it. I was teasing you and me! The pile-ons are by far the worse part of Twitter. The second worse are the people who believe that Twitter likes and Retweets matter. If Musk's changes end up amplifying either he will drive a lot of users away.
On political balance, I have no idea. My interactions tend to be with people who are not at the extremes: more left than right, but that's my politics. I get a lot of value from reading and exchanging views with people on the right, too. The mute and block buttons are very helpful for the loons. But it's not all politics. I follow a lot of people who post paintings, who write about food and drink, who cover countries I am particularly interested in and so on. I got a load of interesting stuff fed to me on a daily basis. Plus, there's the sport. The positive of Twitter far outweighs the negative at the moment. I hope that doesn't change.
TBH, I've never seen the point of Twitter. IMHO, (for what it's worth), instant opinions and brief responses are likely to lead to misunderstandings and indeed offence.
Mr. Royale, aye, they certainly do encourage people to pay for the privilege of shopping with them (it may make sense if you like their TV output and find the Twitch (one) free sub useful).
I ordered something a few days ago, came next day, no delivery cost. So the benefit of Prime would be ...?
One wonders re: Elon Musk's motives re: the Twit-sphere? Pure altruism seems unlikely.
He has stated everybody will have to authenticate. One big problem twitter has always has, they don't know who their users are, and something that has always given Facebook a huge advantage in terms of making money.
Perhaps this is where he see the value prop.
Big issue though is that Twitter doesn’t have scale so it’s not must have for advertisers.
Now, he may be thinking that, with his name behind it, he can get users flocking in as they follow Elon.
But he has apparently said he wants less advertising.
I said early, I honestly can't really figure the angle here. Am grasping at straws really. I don't buy the free speech absolutism angle, so there has to be something in there that he seems as terrible inefficient making it undervalued. The fact twitter doesn't have any idea about its users has long been touted in a world where user data is so value as a big issue with twitter and why the Facebook has made squillions.
I think it's that he is -inevitably- starting to believe his own bullshit.
The very act of him owning Twitter will, he thinks, result in it performing better.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Western arms shipments to Ukraine mean Nato is "in essence engaged in war with Russia" and there is "considerable" risk of the conflict going nuclear
This is now a settled theme from Russia,.
Tbh I'm amazed they haven't said this from the outset, and it's part of the reason why I think we've being really disingenuous about the No Fly Zone. We have drawn our own line by saying that it's fine to supply tons of military equipment, intelligence and, even, special 'advisors' (SAS) to Ukraine but it's not fine to install a NFZ. 95% of people on here have gone along with this, often vociferously. They've told themselves that the one will help Ukraine but won't escalate it but the other would lead to WWIII and Armageddon.
But it's cant and hypocrisy basically, isn't it? If we're going to support Ukraine, bloody well support Ukraine. We should have backed Zelensky's request and stood up to Putin.
Just my opinion. Don't flame me.
Not going to flame you, but consider this: all but the most psychopathic criminals retain a demented sense of justice, a point quite neatly illustrated by monty python's piranha brothers who nail someone's head to the floor "because he had transgressed the unwritten code." Putin's unwritten code includes no nfz.
Or of course, he is bluffing and we only think it does. But don't fall into the narrative of Stand up to the bully, give Ivan a bloody nose and he will always cave in to true British grit. That is a school story and there's no nukes in schools.
If you believe Putin is mad enough to use nukes now, why do you believe he'd suddenly become sane and not threaten to use them after he gets what he wants, and Russia is still a sh*thole and not the world leader it is in his head? Especially as the threat just worked?
It is little to do with 'standing up to a bully'; it is trying to staunch the threat whilst we can.
Again, metaphors are not your friend. You can't "staunch" a Sarmat ICBM.
And I come back to my Piranha brothers point. Even the criminally violent tend to make and stick to arbitrary rules. There is no reason for an insane Putin to even recognise the existence of NATO, but it seems he does.
And you cannot stop Putin demanding more if we cravenly cave in to his evil.
Then why is he and his regime threatening NATO states, and saying they should be under Russia's sphere of influence? he may 'recognise' the existence of NATO; that does not mean the NATO he envisages is the NATO we have at the moment.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
That isn't what that research says. Its saying which tweets got amplified by the algorithm, but not why that happened and whom interacted with it to cause it.
You only have to look on twitter at any given day and some right wing person will tweet something stupid and the mob jump on it e.g. today was Andrew Pierce about home price increase...it was being amplified because a load of people were going look at this right wing idiot.
Owen Jones consistently does this, points out something and the mob pile on "interacts" with the tweet making it go trending. It isn't right wingers causing that trending to appear, but the metric will say ring wing person tweet got lots of engagement.
Yes but I'm not sure you are disagreeing. Even if that is the mechanism in most rather than some cases, and Twitter itself seems not to be sure, the net result is amplification of right wing views. The idea that Twitter is dominated by a shadowy left-wing cabal is not borne out. I suspect that idea is mostly due to a few prominent right-wingers like Donald Trump being barred over fomenting insurrection.
I am disagreeing. The research sounds horrendously flawed and says nothing about who dominants the twitter-sphere. A single right wing tweet getting lots of engagement, it can easily be because a lefty mob is enacting a pile on. That like saying the bloke in the town square is getting lots of engagement because the mob are screaming at him as soon as he speaks, doesn't mean that the town square is enabling fair and balanced discussion and is dressing to the direction of the bloke getting shouted down.
Now do I think twitter is as one sided as that, no. But you made the claim its "dresses right".
Here is the original research which looked at the amplification of tweets by MPs and their foreign equivalents. It found that tweets by Conservatives were amplified more than those by Labour and other parties whether or not government ministers were excluded (and similarly overseas). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
Again, you are missing the point. Engagement doesn't mean twitter dresses right. It means the algorithm is seeing a lot of people interacting with the tweet, and it being twitter it usually means negatively. Every day on twitter its #Boris....as in #BorisOut, #BorisLiar, #BorisKillingGrannies, etc etc etc.
Even if you are correct about the mechanism, the net result is the amplification of those right-wing tweets. In other words, the original (right-wing) tweets are promoted and presented to more people.
But to people who are against them.....complete with a massive stream of criticism. Its doesn't mean "twitter dresses right". Its like saying well the Guardian amplifies right wing because they report Boris comments, comment with 1000s of words of criticism.
I think its actually simpler. Oldies who traditionally lean right dominate the Facebook. The teenagers dominate the TikTok. The 18-35 year olds, and a certain demographic of uni educated etc etc etc, who traditionally lean left dominant on the (political) twitter.
No, Twitter amplifies right-wing comments to those of its users who have chosen to receive tweets ranked by relevance rather than by time. That is what the researchers examined. They also sought to control for the fact that governments make most of the news (which probably explains the alleged lefty bias of comedy panel shows) by checking if the exclusion of ministers' tweets evened things up.
What you seem to be saying might well be true, that attacking others' views generates engagement, and so Twitter will favour divisiveness (thus pleasing Russian trolls and their bosses) but that does not negate, and might not even explain, the above finding about amplification of right-wing views.
Its fairly easy to find right wing stuff on twitter. Looking at the Ruso-Ukranian war for example there are plenty of anti-semitic, pro-Putin posts, often with histories of other racism or misogyny. Many of these accounts seem to be from USA, Africa, or Latin America. The idea that they are suppressed is for the birds.
If Musk thinks that twitter will be improved by reducing any moderation then he has smoked a bit too much dope, and might as well put hus money in NFTs.
I hope Twitter remains useable. I enjoy it a lot. I used to get involved in long back and forths with people but have realised these are entirely pointless. We are never going to agree and you cannot have a proper interaction when you are limited to 240 characters. But I am still a very frequent user as it's a great place to let off steam, to interact with people and to learn stuff from - those 240 characters are limiting, but they also help you distil your thoughts. The working day would drag a lot longer without it.
This is the perfect explanation as to why I came OFF twitter! It exemplifies for me so much that is wrong with the modern world. Reducing complex and nuanced topics to 240 characters is not distillation, it's over-simplification, distortion and bastardisation. It's made for simplistic people with simple binary minds: yes or no to topics which often have myriad shades of grey. Ranters and ravers who, as you say, then pile on in 'entirely pointless' back and forths. It's not designed for people who live in the centre but for what I have come to call, in the ilk of Piers Morgan, 'binary boneheads.'
The only time it is ever of use to me now is for polling and election results, and even those have to be treated with extreme caution. I can see Britain Elect tweets on polls without having an account but tbh these days the wiki opinion poll chart updates just as quickly. In fact they have yesterday's Redfield and Wilton poll up but Britain Elects missed it on their twitter feed.
I don't see myself as a simplistic person with a binary mind. But maybe I am! The first people with the R&W poll yesterday were R&W on Twitter. The headline results and the full polling were all available on the dot of 5.00 pm.
Yes apologies, I didn't mean to imply you are. That was infelicitously expressed by me, sorry. You made clear that you find those kinds of back and forths 'entirely pointless'.
The kind of pile-ons you see from both Right and Left are beyond depressing. A dreadful place imho for anyone who believes that a lot of things in life are multi-faceted, complex and nuanced.
Ha, ha - don't worry about it. I was teasing you and me! The pile-ons are by far the worse part of Twitter. The second worse are the people who believe that Twitter likes and Retweets matter. If Musk's changes end up amplifying either he will drive a lot of users away.
On political balance, I have no idea. My interactions tend to be with people who are not at the extremes: more left than right, but that's my politics. I get a lot of value from reading and exchanging views with people on the right, too. The mute and block buttons are very helpful for the loons. But it's not all politics. I follow a lot of people who post paintings, who write about food and drink, who cover countries I am particularly interested in and so on. I got a load of interesting stuff fed to me on a daily basis. Plus, there's the sport. The positive of Twitter far outweighs the negative at the moment. I hope that doesn't change.
Mr. Sandpit, not up on such things but I thought most people liked 2FA as a security measure. What's the downside?
It can be useful for some people, but it makes it easier to fall down the rabbit hole of being locked out completely with no way back. It’s also a nightmare for people who travel a lot, and have multiple devices not all of which are with them at all times.
Definitely avoid any 2FA that uses a mobile phone as the second factor, which can be lost, stolen or hijacked, better to use a separate RSA device or a YubiKey.
Blimey, ConHome members, eh? Wouldn't want to in a Ukrainian trench with any of them. Rishi has made some errors of late but negative approval levels on ConHome? Brutal.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Western arms shipments to Ukraine mean Nato is "in essence engaged in war with Russia" and there is "considerable" risk of the conflict going nuclear
This is now a settled theme from Russia,.
Tbh I'm amazed they haven't said this from the outset, and it's part of the reason why I think we've being really disingenuous about the No Fly Zone. We have drawn our own line by saying that it's fine to supply tons of military equipment, intelligence and, even, special 'advisors' (SAS) to Ukraine but it's not fine to install a NFZ. 95% of people on here have gone along with this, often vociferously. They've told themselves that the one will help Ukraine but won't escalate it but the other would lead to WWIII and Armageddon.
But it's cant and hypocrisy basically, isn't it? If we're going to support Ukraine, bloody well support Ukraine. We should have backed Zelensky's request and stood up to Putin.
Just my opinion. Don't flame me.
Not going to flame you, but consider this: all but the most psychopathic criminals retain a demented sense of justice, a point quite neatly illustrated by monty python's piranha brothers who nail someone's head to the floor "because he had transgressed the unwritten code." Putin's unwritten code includes no nfz.
Or of course, he is bluffing and we only think it does. But don't fall into the narrative of Stand up to the bully, give Ivan a bloody nose and he will always cave in to true British grit. That is a school story and there's no nukes in schools.
If you believe Putin is mad enough to use nukes now, why do you believe he'd suddenly become sane and not threaten to use them after he gets what he wants, and Russia is still a sh*thole and not the world leader it is in his head? Especially as the threat just worked?
It is little to do with 'standing up to a bully'; it is trying to staunch the threat whilst we can.
Again, metaphors are not your friend. You can't "staunch" a Sarmat ICBM.
And I come back to my Piranha brothers point. Even the criminally violent tend to make and stick to arbitrary rules. There is no reason for an insane Putin to even recognise the existence of NATO, but it seems he does.
And you cannot stop Putin demanding more if we cravenly cave in to his evil.
Then why is he and his regime threatening NATO states, and saying they should be under Russia's sphere of influence? he may 'recognise' the existence of NATO; that does not mean the NATO he envisages is the NATO we have at the moment.
More metaphors. There is no "trying to staunch the threat while we still can" as if he were building up an empire which will one day be big enough to threaten us. He already has Sarmat.
Obviously we have to draw a line somewhere and there seems to be a consensus that the line is NATO countries. I wouldn't be comfortable doing less than we are doing but it is already an ultra high risk strategy and I don't wanna do any more.
Let us not forget russia nuking its own satellite last November. I wonder why it did that. There's a non zero chance Armageddon is already scripted in some detail: the timetable for Sarmat coming online must have been known for years, and I do wonder whether it dictated the timetable for Ukraine.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Western arms shipments to Ukraine mean Nato is "in essence engaged in war with Russia" and there is "considerable" risk of the conflict going nuclear
This is now a settled theme from Russia, cf
A senior commentator on state television stated recently that any attempt to send NATO peacekeepers to Ukraine would be a casus belli, provoking war between Russia and NATO. “To win this war,” he blandly explained, “whether we like it or not, we will have to use tactical nuclear weapons in the theatre of operations. This will then entail the use of powerful strategic nuclear weapons.”
I think they are building up for a shooting war on May 9. Bet accordingly.
Shooting at whom? With what?
I can see him having a toddler tantrum and nuking Kyiv, on the basis of "If I can't have it, you can't have it either....". He will claim its smouldering ruins have been "de-nazified" - job done. But after that? The only reason he has any offensive capability short of nukes is because the Russian armed forces haven't faced the full suite of NATO's non-nuclear firepower. It wouldn't have much of a hydrocarbons economy within an hour.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Western arms shipments to Ukraine mean Nato is "in essence engaged in war with Russia" and there is "considerable" risk of the conflict going nuclear
This is now a settled theme from Russia,.
Tbh I'm amazed they haven't said this from the outset, and it's part of the reason why I think we've being really disingenuous about the No Fly Zone. We have drawn our own line by saying that it's fine to supply tons of military equipment, intelligence and, even, special 'advisors' (SAS) to Ukraine but it's not fine to install a NFZ. 95% of people on here have gone along with this, often vociferously. They've told themselves that the one will help Ukraine but won't escalate it but the other would lead to WWIII and Armageddon.
But it's cant and hypocrisy basically, isn't it? If we're going to support Ukraine, bloody well support Ukraine. We should have backed Zelensky's request and stood up to Putin.
Just my opinion. Don't flame me.
Not going to flame you, but consider this: all but the most psychopathic criminals retain a demented sense of justice, a point quite neatly illustrated by monty python's piranha brothers who nail someone's head to the floor "because he had transgressed the unwritten code." Putin's unwritten code includes no nfz.
Or of course, he is bluffing and we only think it does. But don't fall into the narrative of Stand up to the bully, give Ivan a bloody nose and he will always cave in to true British grit. That is a school story and there's no nukes in schools.
If you believe Putin is mad enough to use nukes now, why do you believe he'd suddenly become sane and not threaten to use them after he gets what he wants, and Russia is still a sh*thole and not the world leader it is in his head? Especially as the threat just worked?
It is little to do with 'standing up to a bully'; it is trying to staunch the threat whilst we can.
Again, metaphors are not your friend. You can't "staunch" a Sarmat ICBM.
And I come back to my Piranha brothers point. Even the criminally violent tend to make and stick to arbitrary rules. There is no reason for an insane Putin to even recognise the existence of NATO, but it seems he does.
And you cannot stop Putin demanding more if we cravenly cave in to his evil.
Then why is he and his regime threatening NATO states, and saying they should be under Russia's sphere of influence? he may 'recognise' the existence of NATO; that does not mean the NATO he envisages is the NATO we have at the moment.
More metaphors. There is no "trying to staunch the threat while we still can" as if he were building up an empire which will one day be big enough to threaten us. He already has Sarmat.
Obviously we have to draw a line somewhere and there seems to be a consensus that the line is NATO countries. I wouldn't be comfortable doing less than we are doing but it is already an ultra high risk strategy and I don't wanna do any more.
Let us not forget russia nuking its own satellite last November. I wonder why it did that. There's a non zero chance Armageddon is already scripted in some detail: the timetable for Sarmat coming online must have been known for years, and I do wonder whether it dictated the timetable for Ukraine.
The invasion timing was dictated by not wanting to step on Xi and the Olympics.
A couple of months ago, he was expecting to be met with flowers and Russian flags all the way to Kiev - the first tanks over the Ukranian border even had the No.1 uniforms for the soldiers to wear on parade.
Since 24th February, they’ve been massively on the back foot. Nothing since then has been properly planned, it’s all been reactive.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Western arms shipments to Ukraine mean Nato is "in essence engaged in war with Russia" and there is "considerable" risk of the conflict going nuclear
This is now a settled theme from Russia,.
Tbh I'm amazed they haven't said this from the outset, and it's part of the reason why I think we've being really disingenuous about the No Fly Zone. We have drawn our own line by saying that it's fine to supply tons of military equipment, intelligence and, even, special 'advisors' (SAS) to Ukraine but it's not fine to install a NFZ. 95% of people on here have gone along with this, often vociferously. They've told themselves that the one will help Ukraine but won't escalate it but the other would lead to WWIII and Armageddon.
But it's cant and hypocrisy basically, isn't it? If we're going to support Ukraine, bloody well support Ukraine. We should have backed Zelensky's request and stood up to Putin.
Just my opinion. Don't flame me.
Not going to flame you, but consider this: all but the most psychopathic criminals retain a demented sense of justice, a point quite neatly illustrated by monty python's piranha brothers who nail someone's head to the floor "because he had transgressed the unwritten code." Putin's unwritten code includes no nfz.
Or of course, he is bluffing and we only think it does. But don't fall into the narrative of Stand up to the bully, give Ivan a bloody nose and he will always cave in to true British grit. That is a school story and there's no nukes in schools.
If you believe Putin is mad enough to use nukes now, why do you believe he'd suddenly become sane and not threaten to use them after he gets what he wants, and Russia is still a sh*thole and not the world leader it is in his head? Especially as the threat just worked?
It is little to do with 'standing up to a bully'; it is trying to staunch the threat whilst we can.
Again, metaphors are not your friend. You can't "staunch" a Sarmat ICBM.
And I come back to my Piranha brothers point. Even the criminally violent tend to make and stick to arbitrary rules. There is no reason for an insane Putin to even recognise the existence of NATO, but it seems he does.
And you cannot stop Putin demanding more if we cravenly cave in to his evil.
Then why is he and his regime threatening NATO states, and saying they should be under Russia's sphere of influence? he may 'recognise' the existence of NATO; that does not mean the NATO he envisages is the NATO we have at the moment.
More metaphors. There is no "trying to staunch the threat while we still can" as if he were building up an empire which will one day be big enough to threaten us. He already has Sarmat.
Obviously we have to draw a line somewhere and there seems to be a consensus that the line is NATO countries. I wouldn't be comfortable doing less than we are doing but it is already an ultra high risk strategy and I don't wanna do any more.
Let us not forget russia nuking its own satellite last November. I wonder why it did that. There's a non zero chance Armageddon is already scripted in some detail: the timetable for Sarmat coming online must have been known for years, and I do wonder whether it dictated the timetable for Ukraine.
Did anyone else watch Trump on TalkTV with Peirs Morgan last night? He claimed he would ban the "N word" in any discussions with Russia and repeatedly claimed that the threat to Russia was far, far more powerful than anything coming the other way. Of course there is the problem that he is as mad as a box of frogs.
A survey of 170 employees at Twitter from Blind found that they were worried about Musk acquiring Twitter, Fortune previously reported. A former female engineer at SpaceX alleged in a public essay that the culture was rife with sexism.
One employee, Edward Perez, a director of product management at Twitter, said in a Monday afternoon tweet that he and his coworkers are feeling "genuine discomfort and uncertainty."
At the end of the day Twitter is just a website. No-one needs to be there, it has no original content. The $40 billion is quite remarkable if you think about it. If Musk mucks it up, people will shift as they have done to several highly valued social media sites already. Or to put it another way, the fact users have stuck with Twitter suggests the current management has done a reasonably good job.
User inertia is too high. It's like all those people who said they would stop using WhatsApp if Facebook bought it, then the same people said it again when they merged the data, then the same people said it again when they introduced a new privacy policy. In the end everyone sticks around because it's where all their friends and family are. Twitter has the same level of user inertia, moving to another platform is simply too difficult and that's where the value is derived.
Additionally, in the famous words of Michael Jordan, "Republicans buy shoes too" - Twitter has cultivated a culture of overt leftism and excluded a huge and profitable market based on ideology of the board, there's a huge amount of value simply being left on the table. Unlocking that value is where Elon musk will make his money, and at $44bn he could monetise it in a way that Twitter is able to repay the full investment in less than a decade.
That isn't what that research says. Its saying which tweets got amplified by the algorithm, but not why that happened and whom interacted with it to cause it.
You only have to look on twitter at any given day and some right wing person will tweet something stupid and the mob jump on it e.g. today was Andrew Pierce about home price increase...it was being amplified because a load of people were going look at this right wing idiot.
Owen Jones consistently does this, points out something and the mob pile on "interacts" with the tweet making it go trending. It isn't right wingers causing that trending to appear, but the metric will say ring wing person tweet got lots of engagement.
Yes but I'm not sure you are disagreeing. Even if that is the mechanism in most rather than some cases, and Twitter itself seems not to be sure, the net result is amplification of right wing views. The idea that Twitter is dominated by a shadowy left-wing cabal is not borne out. I suspect that idea is mostly due to a few prominent right-wingers like Donald Trump being barred over fomenting insurrection.
I am disagreeing. The research sounds horrendously flawed and says nothing about who dominants the twitter-sphere. A single right wing tweet getting lots of engagement, it can easily be because a lefty mob is enacting a pile on. That like saying the bloke in the town square is getting lots of engagement because the mob are screaming at him as soon as he speaks, doesn't mean that the town square is enabling fair and balanced discussion and is dressing to the direction of the bloke getting shouted down.
Now do I think twitter is as one sided as that, no. But you made the claim its "dresses right".
Here is the original research which looked at the amplification of tweets by MPs and their foreign equivalents. It found that tweets by Conservatives were amplified more than those by Labour and other parties whether or not government ministers were excluded (and similarly overseas). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
Again, you are missing the point. Engagement doesn't mean twitter dresses right. It means the algorithm is seeing a lot of people interacting with the tweet, and it being twitter it usually means negatively. Every day on twitter its #Boris....as in #BorisOut, #BorisLiar, #BorisKillingGrannies, etc etc etc.
Even if you are correct about the mechanism, the net result is the amplification of those right-wing tweets. In other words, the original (right-wing) tweets are promoted and presented to more people.
But to people who are against them.....complete with a massive stream of criticism. Its doesn't mean "twitter dresses right". Its like saying well the Guardian amplifies right wing because they report Boris comments, comment with 1000s of words of criticism.
I think its actually simpler. Oldies who traditionally lean right dominate the Facebook. The teenagers dominate the TikTok. The 18-35 year olds, and a certain demographic of uni educated etc etc etc, who traditionally lean left dominant on the (political) twitter.
No, Twitter amplifies right-wing comments to those of its users who have chosen to receive tweets ranked by relevance rather than by time. That is what the researchers examined. They also sought to control for the fact that governments make most of the news (which probably explains the alleged lefty bias of comedy panel shows) by checking if the exclusion of ministers' tweets evened things up.
What you seem to be saying might well be true, that attacking others' views generates engagement, and so Twitter will favour divisiveness (thus pleasing Russian trolls and their bosses) but that does not negate, and might not even explain, the above finding about amplification of right-wing views.
Its fairly easy to find right wing stuff on twitter. Looking at the Ruso-Ukranian war for example there are plenty of anti-semitic, pro-Putin posts, often with histories of other racism or misogyny. Many of these accounts seem to be from USA, Africa, or Latin America. The idea that they are suppressed is for the birds.
If Musk thinks that twitter will be improved by reducing any moderation then he has smoked a bit too much dope, and might as well put hus money in NFTs.
I hope Twitter remains useable. I enjoy it a lot. I used to get involved in long back and forths with people but have realised these are entirely pointless. We are never going to agree and you cannot have a proper interaction when you are limited to 240 characters. But I am still a very frequent user as it's a great place to let off steam, to interact with people and to learn stuff from - those 240 characters are limiting, but they also help you distil your thoughts. The working day would drag a lot longer without it.
This is the perfect explanation as to why I came OFF twitter! It exemplifies for me so much that is wrong with the modern world. Reducing complex and nuanced topics to 240 characters is not distillation, it's over-simplification, distortion and bastardisation. It's made for simplistic people with simple binary minds: yes or no to topics which often have myriad shades of grey...
That seems a pretty binary judgment of your own, and suggests you never worked out how to use Twitter. It's an extremely efficient way of getting pointers to new and interesting stuff from smart people. You just have to have a filter.
And before anyone asks, yes I wear a mask when flying. And will likely continue to do so for a while. Even before Covid it was clear that aircraft were great places to catch the lurgy.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Western arms shipments to Ukraine mean Nato is "in essence engaged in war with Russia" and there is "considerable" risk of the conflict going nuclear
This is now a settled theme from Russia,.
Tbh I'm amazed they haven't said this from the outset, and it's part of the reason why I think we've being really disingenuous about the No Fly Zone. We have drawn our own line by saying that it's fine to supply tons of military equipment, intelligence and, even, special 'advisors' (SAS) to Ukraine but it's not fine to install a NFZ. 95% of people on here have gone along with this, often vociferously. They've told themselves that the one will help Ukraine but won't escalate it but the other would lead to WWIII and Armageddon.
But it's cant and hypocrisy basically, isn't it? If we're going to support Ukraine, bloody well support Ukraine. We should have backed Zelensky's request and stood up to Putin.
Just my opinion. Don't flame me.
Not going to flame you, but consider this: all but the most psychopathic criminals retain a demented sense of justice, a point quite neatly illustrated by monty python's piranha brothers who nail someone's head to the floor "because he had transgressed the unwritten code." Putin's unwritten code includes no nfz.
Or of course, he is bluffing and we only think it does. But don't fall into the narrative of Stand up to the bully, give Ivan a bloody nose and he will always cave in to true British grit. That is a school story and there's no nukes in schools.
If you believe Putin is mad enough to use nukes now, why do you believe he'd suddenly become sane and not threaten to use them after he gets what he wants, and Russia is still a sh*thole and not the world leader it is in his head? Especially as the threat just worked?
It is little to do with 'standing up to a bully'; it is trying to staunch the threat whilst we can.
Again, metaphors are not your friend. You can't "staunch" a Sarmat ICBM.
And I come back to my Piranha brothers point. Even the criminally violent tend to make and stick to arbitrary rules. There is no reason for an insane Putin to even recognise the existence of NATO, but it seems he does.
And you cannot stop Putin demanding more if we cravenly cave in to his evil.
Then why is he and his regime threatening NATO states, and saying they should be under Russia's sphere of influence? he may 'recognise' the existence of NATO; that does not mean the NATO he envisages is the NATO we have at the moment.
More metaphors. There is no "trying to staunch the threat while we still can" as if he were building up an empire which will one day be big enough to threaten us. He already has Sarmat.
Obviously we have to draw a line somewhere and there seems to be a consensus that the line is NATO countries. I wouldn't be comfortable doing less than we are doing but it is already an ultra high risk strategy and I don't wanna do any more.
Let us not forget russia nuking its own satellite last November. I wonder why it did that. There's a non zero chance Armageddon is already scripted in some detail: the timetable for Sarmat coming online must have been known for years, and I do wonder whether it dictated the timetable for Ukraine.
Did anyone else watch Trump on TalkTV with Peirs Morgan last night? He claimed he would ban the "N word" in any discussions with Russia and repeatedly claimed that the threat to Russia was far, far more powerful than anything coming the other way. Of course there is the problem that he is as mad as a box of frogs.
No. I'd prefer to watch real primary school kids trying to debate foreign policy, rather than two grown men trying to simulate that.
Comments
(Though Bezos seems to have gotten sidetracked by his new girlfriend and, possibly, his mega yacht.)
However, though it’s being argued Ang is entitled to do her hair and hemline her way, be however she feels comfortable within whatever work place dress codes there are these days (would be fun getting Rees Mogg onto those) if she asked me to style her to improve her career prospects I would still, as I have long argued, lob the hair and drop the hemline below the knee. Yes it’s important to look in mirror feel good about yourself, see and feel the positives not negatives - but there is a price to pay, a compromise to strike for anyone serious about career - nothing to do with sex, as improving career prospects by dressing to a certain conventional style applies equally to men and women, where rules of the game are don’t concede an inch to your opponents, so don’t in anyway stand out or be unconventional would be my opinion.
Do you know what is the most insane thing about what the Mail have done, not picked up yet? A couple of PMQs ago, as a lady sitting behind Boris (the one always there and constantly tapping into the phone) crossed her legs, we all saw her knickers.
@GregAbbott_TX
@elonmusk. Bring Twitter to Texas to join Tesla, SpaceX & the Boring company.
https://twitter.com/GregAbbott_TX/status/1518693037337194496
While Musk blasts off into the ozone to recreate yet another Jules Verne novel - sacré bleu!
How much will you pay me for that insight?
For some products and services customers need to know there is a face to face service if they need it even if they never use it.
If you ever try dealing with a big organisation when there is a problem it will soon educate you about arguing with a faceless company where no one person takes responsibility or is accountable for mistakes.
As a result, you can target Facebook ads at a ridiculously granular level. Google can, Amazon can, Facebook can, Twitter can't. As a result they are hamstrung when it comes to selling advertising services. Its is why Facebook makes squillions and Twitter has always struggled to make money in comparison to that.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/twitter-algorithm-right-wing-news-bias-b1943170.html
You only have to look on twitter at any given day and some right wing person will tweet something stupid and the mob jump on it e.g. today was Andrew Pierce about home price increase...it was being amplified because a load of people were going look at this right wing idiot.
Owen Jones consistently does this, points out something and the mob pile on "interacts" with the tweet making it go trending. It isn't right wingers causing that trending to appear, but the metric will say ring wing person tweet got lots of engagement.
Now do I think twitter is as one sided as that, no. But you made the claim its "dresses right".
Thank-you, that makes a lot more sense!
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
As I gave the example, the bloke in the town square as soon as he opens his mouth getting screamed at by a mob, doesn't mean the guy is getting preferential treatment in any way. On most social media, if people vaguely agree with something, they just keep scrolling past. The passionate (and usually angry) are the ones spending time replying like crazy with comments saying you liar, cheat, fraud, etc.
I think its actually simpler. Oldies who traditionally lean right dominate the Facebook. The teenagers dominate the TikTok. The 18-35 year olds, and a certain demographic of uni educated etc etc etc, who traditionally lean left dominant on the (political) twitter.
Anyone who is saying Twitter's ban violates the First Amendment doesn't know Twitter is a private company and the First Amendment protects individuals against government.
https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1347939948096180225?s=20&t=1AMDCXH-ySfTTtVc5juIlA
How its going....
It’s called platform monopoly. It’s bad for our democracy as well as our economy.
https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1518663262639955971?s=20&t=008FdbfSltVtP674pDi7bg
“I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on TRUTH,” Trump told Fox News. “I hope Elon buys Twitter because he’ll make improvements to it and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on TRUTH.” (source Seattle Times)
Not sure I'd bet the farm on that. Or 2-cents.
Trump says he won’t return to Twitter
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/trump-twitter-elon-musk-takeover-b2065239.html
What you seem to be saying might well be true, that attacking others' views generates engagement, and so Twitter will favour divisiveness (thus pleasing Russian trolls and their bosses) but that does not negate, and might not even explain, the above finding about amplification of right-wing views.
As I say, its like how the Guardian will always report a JRM or Ben Bradley or whatever other Tory numpty has made a foul of themselves to their readers, less so lefty MPs.
I stick by my analogy of the random guy in the town square getting shouted down. Yes all the racket everybody is made aware, but all that is happening is a massive pile on, he isn't getting a fair shake to explain their position and the mob just fire hose negative comments against it.
Anyway, bit bored of the discussion now. It isn't really that interesting. I am not that interested in twitter before or after Elon bought it.
Rather in specific (or rather egocentric) sense - good for Trump.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-10753075/Anfield-ineligible-host-games-Euro-2028-owing-pitch-dimensions.html
Things must have changed as it hosted games in Euro 96.
Mind you, Anglo-Iranian was nationalised in March 1951 and I presume this affected oil prices…
The returns on equity in my business start to make sense (as in you'll exceed your cost of capital) in the high 2s, and look pretty amazing once you get north of 4x
It announced the export ban on 22 April, until further notice, in a move to tackle rising domestic prices.
“This is happening when the export tonnages of all other major oils are under pressure: soya bean oil due to droughts in South America; rapeseed oil due to disastrous canola crops in Canada; and sunflower oil because of Russia’s war on Ukraine,”
Guardian
Meanwhile I'm sure you all saw this article on the local elections? Very good guide on what to expect from Ben Walker at the New Statseman: https://sotn.newstatesman.com/2022/04/all-you-need-to-know-about-the-2022-local-elections/
If Musk thinks that twitter will be improved by reducing any moderation then he has smoked a bit too much dope, and might as well put hus money in NFTs.
Appears Denbighshire has provided wrong information on it's postal vote packs
Not sure how they remedy it
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-61217471
LOL at the reaction to Musk buying Twitter. From reading the reports, it sounds like his plan to verify everyone has gone down badly with the already verified and their hordes of fake followers. Expect to see many of the banned people coming back too, and a lot of staff turnover among the ‘activist employees’.
Yes, Republicans buy shoes too, and that’s the huge opportunity for Twitter to grow.
First, LIE NO.1 there was only one source not 'sources'.
Second, LIE No.2 I have only once used my source for a story on here, which was about misogynism in the parliamentary Conservative Party, as it happens.
Third, LIE No. 3 or MISUNDERSTANDING No. 1, I never once said that they were "at the top of the Conservative Party". Not a single time. And the reason I know that to be the case is because they aren't. I said, 'they are at the heart of Government'. Not the same thing and most people on here will now be able to work that out.
Fourth, LIE No. 4 'repeated outrageous and unsubstantiated claims'. Now you've gone from lying to hyperbole to a wild rant.
Fifth, the bare-faced Chutzpah of criticising anonymity when you yourself changed your name on here from P****P T*******N is truly remarkable.
I use a VPN whenever I use the internet. I am very concerned about analytics, data mining and tracking: euphemistically called 'cookies' as if they are something sweet and nice. Ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal I have gone anonymous online. I believe EVERYONE should think seriously about doing the same. I also came off all social media platforms.
For everyone for VPN's I can recommend Windscribe and FreeVPN. Both have been excellent.
For browsers I use the excellent Gener8 on privacy mode and DuckDuckGo for searching.
Get a Taycan instead, or the new Merc EQS.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-61224309
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFA_stadium_categories
To be fair, Mr D, our friend and colleague Mr G supports Scottish independence, not the SNP!
There's a difference.
I hope Twitter remains useable. I enjoy it a lot. I used to get involved in long back and forths with people but have realised these are entirely pointless. We are never going to agree and you cannot have a proper interaction when you are limited to 240 characters. But I am still a very frequent user as it's a great place to let off steam, to interact with people and to learn stuff from - those 240 characters are limiting, but they also help you distil your thoughts. The working day would drag a lot longer without it.
The only time it is ever of use to me now is for polling and election results, and even those have to be treated with extreme caution. I can see Britain Elect tweets on polls without having an account but tbh these days the wiki opinion poll chart updates just as quickly. In fact they have yesterday's Redfield and Wilton poll up but Britain Elects missed it on their twitter feed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election#2022
I tried Signal but now use iMessage and Telegram although I have some concerns about privacy with the latter. And for my friends in Thailand I use Line.
So I use those as message mediums but have come off all other forms of public social media: Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp. Deleted all accounts.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/04/25/shadow-cabinet-warns-sir-keir-starmer-not-lose-sight-cost-of/
This is now a settled theme from Russia, cf
A senior commentator on state television stated recently that any attempt to send NATO peacekeepers to Ukraine would be a casus belli, provoking war between Russia and NATO. “To win this war,” he blandly explained, “whether we like it or not, we will have to use tactical nuclear weapons in the theatre of operations. This will then entail the use of powerful strategic nuclear weapons.”
https://reaction.life/wartime-putins-russia-has-become-a-madhouse-threatening-the-world
I think they are building up for a shooting war on May 9. Bet accordingly.
But it's cant and hypocrisy basically, isn't it? If we're going to support Ukraine, support Ukraine. We should have backed Zelensky's request and stood up to Putin. He asked for a No Fly Zone and we turned him down. The result has been the pulverisation of an entire country and her people. Some support.
Just my opinion. Don't flame me.
The kind of pile-ons you see from both Right and Left are beyond depressing. A dreadful place imho for anyone who believes that a lot of things in life are multi-faceted, complex and nuanced.
Or of course, he is bluffing and we only think it does. But don't fall into the narrative of Stand up to the bully, give Ivan a bloody nose and he will always cave in to true British grit. That is a school story and there's no nukes in schools.
If they want a war with NATO they’re going to get a war with NATO. It’ll be a very short war, and they’ll be toast.
It is little to do with 'standing up to a bully'; it is trying to staunch the threat whilst we can.
Sources said that the senior civil servant, who for months has been forced to sit on her findings about illegal gatherings while Scotland Yard carries out its own inquiry, believes the police investigation could drag on for several more weeks.
https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/26/sue-gray-report-to-be-completed-by-end-of-may-at-earliest-sources-say
Bettors on phatboi exit date note
On political balance, I have no idea. My interactions tend to be with people who are not at the extremes: more left than right, but that's my politics. I get a lot of value from reading and exchanging views with people on the right, too. The mute and block buttons are very helpful for the loons. But it's not all politics. I follow a lot of people who post paintings, who write about food and drink, who cover countries I am particularly interested in and so on. I got a load of interesting stuff fed to me on a daily basis. Plus, there's the sport. The positive of Twitter far outweighs the negative at the moment. I hope that doesn't change.
And I come back to my Piranha brothers point. Even the criminally violent tend to make and stick to arbitrary rules. There is no reason for an insane Putin to even recognise the existence of NATO, but it seems he does.
Meanwhile in the real world, inflation is at 8%, petrol is £1.70 a litre, and domestic fuel bills have doubled in the last year.
The reaction piece linked to above plausibly claims that Putin and a large number of his people think Russia could survive nuclear war.
You have to concentrate on hitting the right (tiny and non-highlighted) button every time.
Mr. Royale, aye, they certainly do encourage people to pay for the privilege of shopping with them (it may make sense if you like their TV output and find the Twitch (one) free sub useful).
I ordered something a few days ago, came next day, no delivery cost. So the benefit of Prime would be ...?
Then why is he and his regime threatening NATO states, and saying they should be under Russia's sphere of influence? he may 'recognise' the existence of NATO; that does not mean the NATO he envisages is the NATO we have at the moment.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9vkaVx8ovxA#t=16m0s
(16:00)
Definitely avoid any 2FA that uses a mobile phone as the second factor, which can be lost, stolen or hijacked, better to use a separate RSA device or a YubiKey.
Obviously we have to draw a line somewhere and there seems to be a consensus that the line is NATO countries. I wouldn't be comfortable doing less than we are doing but it is already an ultra high risk strategy and I don't wanna do any more.
Let us not forget russia nuking its own satellite last November. I wonder why it did that. There's a non zero chance Armageddon is already scripted in some detail: the timetable for Sarmat coming online must have been known for years, and I do wonder whether it dictated the timetable for Ukraine.
I can see him having a toddler tantrum and nuking Kyiv, on the basis of "If I can't have it, you can't have it either....". He will claim its smouldering ruins have been "de-nazified" - job done. But after that? The only reason he has any offensive capability short of nukes is because the Russian armed forces haven't faced the full suite of NATO's non-nuclear firepower. It wouldn't have much of a hydrocarbons economy within an hour.
A couple of months ago, he was expecting to be met with flowers and Russian flags all the way to Kiev - the first tanks over the Ukranian border even had the No.1 uniforms for the soldiers to wear on parade.
Since 24th February, they’ve been massively on the back foot. Nothing since then has been properly planned, it’s all been reactive.
It's an extremely efficient way of getting pointers to new and interesting stuff from smart people. You just have to have a filter.
I'd prefer to watch real primary school kids trying to debate foreign policy, rather than two grown men trying to simulate that.