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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Lawyered Up (Open Thread)

Lawyered Up (Open Thread)

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Valued commenter Trollhattan linked this tweet with a fantastic demand letter on behalf of Twitter employees in an earlier thread:

Dayum! I looked for an image to embed but didn’t see one. It’s well worth clicking through to read in full, even if you hate the bird app. Otherwise, open thread.

Also, this seems really bad:

Reader Interactions

37Comments

  2. 2.

    trucmat

    That demand letter was awesome. Musk can’t sidestep forever and is eventually going to pay those ex Twitter employees what they have already earned.

    Question to those with a Twitter account. Are Swastikas being posted now without action? Supposedly got Ye banned so might be helpful to step up reporting on such images. If autobanning is happening then get em banned and let Elon unban them one at a time if he wishes. Strategy is being used by the right so turnabout is fair play.

  3. 3.

    MattF

    That’s quite a letter. No more of this ‘we’re lawyers so we’re gonna use complex syntax and Latin’. And FWIW, the letter writer does appear to know what he’s talking about.

  4. 4.

    Bobby Thomson

    This letter was written to be broadly shared.  Demand letters tend to be sternly worded and technical, but this reads more like a series of burns – sort of like the Rumours album.

  5. 5.

    Soprano2

    OMG, that letter is obviously written for wide consumption, because it’s straightfoward and easy for even an idiot to understand. Just wow……..

  6. 6.

    Soprano2

    @Bobby Thomson: Speaking of the “Rumours” album, I’ve been listening to it today. I bought it when it first came out. That’s got to be one of the great albums of all time, almost every cut was a hit. So fight me on that! LOL

  8. 8.

    Spanky

    “Deposing you will be a joy” and ending in “All the best,”

    More freude from the schaden

    ETA, I wonder if the double entendre in “deposing” was intentional.

  10. 10.

    BlueGuitarist

    First spotted this excellent item on this full service blog last night – RaflW comment 20 in JC’s greetings from the road

    (BC  feel free to delete this comment)

    Eta excellent the letter on behalf of twitter employees not the later, ugh

  11. 11.

    Betty Cracker

    @trucmat: I haven’t seen any, but I’m spending less time there. It’s untenable for a platform used by millions to be moderated on the whims of a single jackass owner, but that seems to be the case at the moment. What a shit-show. Probably the only hope for that platform is that Musk gets bored soon, appoints someone marginally competent to run it and moves on to the next shiny object.

  12. 12.

    Soprano2

    @Jeffro: Yeah, that was my first clue that this wasn’t going to be the normal type demand letter, and it didn’t disappoint.

  15. 15.

    pacem appellant

    Twitter is 4chan. It’ll be unusable by xmas. My prediction of its “death” by April holds. In quotes because Musk has lots of money to throw at Twitter long after its no longer viable, so it’ll still be around, but no body will be talking on it anymore and it’ll cease to be the place to go for breaking news and views.

  17. 17.

    Falling Diphthong

    @trucmat: You don’t ban Kanye post meltdown for a swastika (or “incitement to violence” as Musk called it) while inviting in the Daily Storm because of some coherent policy.

    Elon is banning and reinstating people capriciously (as any owner of a private social media site can do), seemingly mostly as a result of the wingnuts he trusts telling him who to let on and off. At the same time, there seems to be a big uptick in using bots to endlessly report totally normal accounts for spamming, resulting in those accounts being banned by the algorithm. Basically it’s what everyone except Elon expected when Elon fired everyone and reinstated a bunch of fascist wingnuts.

    For people who are strict about their settings (e.g. you ban trolls, and people who argue with trolls and thus show up in your timeline), I think it’s been pretty normal if you don’t get in the crosshairs of any algorithms. I imagine “in the crosshairs of algorithms” to increase over time, degrading the user experience.

  20. 20.

    Gravenstone

    @Jeffro: Half had me wondering if that were an actual official title from the founding of the company. Appropriate whether original or jibe.

  21. 21.

    Gravenstone

    @Alison Rose: I’ll not post it, but I have seen graphical turnabout with “Ye” being graphically tweaked to look like a swastika. So he’s getting a bit of his own in return.

  23. 23.

    Anoniminous

    The Chief Twit just discovered Twitter is …

    An Advertising Company!

    That’s right boys & girls to the utter bebaffled and befuddled amazement of Elon 90% of Twitter’s revenue stems directly from advertising.  He might have discovered this sooner if he had (a) bothered to do any due diligence before vastly over-paying for the company and (b) not fired the Sales department as one of his first acts on the first day of his ownership.

  24. 24.

    dm

    @pacem appellant: Musk doesn’t actually have a lot of money.

    He has a lot of stock in rapidly-diminishing brands that have been buoyed by the hype around his alleged brilliance.  He’s lost about a third of his paper wealth in the past year — $100 billion.  (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-net-worth-decreased-100-million-tesla-stock-sold-twitter-acquisition-richest-man-in-the-world/)

    On top of gifting money to former Twitter stockholders, Tesla stock has lost 50% of its value in the past year (and I suspect has nowhere to go but down as the competition increases and the hype evaporates).

    Take a look at the chart toward the bottom of this page:

    https://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/?sh=6cbda8167999

    Forbes says his net-worth was $25 billion in 2020, then it suddenly shot up to $151 billion in 2021, then $219 billion in 2022 (at the moment, they peg him at $197 billion) — this isn’t consistent with what the CBS article says about him having gotten to $304 billion in January of this year, but, it’s all funny money.

    That chart makes me suspect that his net worth is really fragile, consisting of evaluation of stocks (some, e.g., SpaceX, privately held, so its value is what the private investors say it is[1]), that would evaporate if he actually had to sell it to pay his debts.

    [1] Elizabeth Holmes got a lot of such investors to believe in the value of Theranos; Musk’s DMs revealed during the Twitter litigation suggested a lot of the people backing him to be embarrassingly credulous.

  26. 26.

    HumboldtBlue

    Shocked face

    NYT: Breaking News: Hate speech on Twitter has jumped since Elon Musk took over, researchers found. Musk “sent up the Bat Signal to every kind of racist, misogynist and homophobe that Twitter was open for business,” the head of one of the research groups said.

  28. 28.

    dc

    @Falling Diphthong: I use the chronological feed. I only see tweets from people I follow published in reverse chronological order. I have also blocked Trump, Musk and others, so if they are quote tweeted, I don’t see their tweets. Anyone I follow who quote tweets or tweets too many images of assholes like Trump and Musk, I stop following. So my feed is pretty Nazi free. I am still using Twitter less and less. I’m on Mastodon now more.

  30. 30.

    Geminid

    I see that Cheryl Rofer is on Post.news now, although she says she’ll still hang out on Twitter for a while.

    And like I said earlier, Magdi Jacobs (Mangy Jay) is asking her followers what would be a good Mastodon instance for her.

  31. 31.

    Shalimar

    @Falling Diphthong: Interestingly enough, Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer had another warrant issued for his arrest just 3 weeks ago.  So Anglin can’t show his face anywhere in the world with an extradition treaty with the US, but he can post on Twitter again.

  32. 32.

    Ruckus

    @trucmat:

    I have a twitter account. I have been checking in once or twice a day.

    Not any more.

    Almost every other comment seems to be a deranged nazi sympathizer. Or worse. Some are hanging on to hope that it will get better. It won’t. Not until SFB2 sells it for $1.95 to an actual human. And I’m not holding my breath.

  34. 34.

    pacem appellant

    @dm: Good points! I amend my statement:

    Musk has more money than I.

    He should have no trouble selling a Te$la share or two to keep the domain running with a couple of cheap Digital Ocean VMs.

  36. 36.

    Dadadadadadada

    @HumboldtBlue: Were I feeling uncommonly generous, I might suppose that Musk unbanned him in the hope of baiting him into tweeting something with traceable Metadata, thus revealing his location.

    But Musk has long since forfeited any benefit of the doubt I might have given him.

  37. 37.

    Ella in New Mexico

    Love, love LOVE that demand letter! Very interesting that in Washington Musk can be sued personally, not just hide behind Twitter, for his behavior.

    I’d like to see some personal law suits against him for putting people like Anglin back on. Anglin has been sued by multiple people and found guilty of defamation, etc. Maybe he starts doing his thing on Twitter again and a victim sues Elon personally for allowing him to do so?

    Man, that would be so awesome.

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