All posts tagged: Social media

Elon Musk Shared, Then Deleted X Post Absolving Hitler, Stalin and Mao of Genocide

Published by skeptic

Early on Friday, Elon Musk shared a post written by an X user about the actions of three 20th century dictators — then quickly deleted it after it sparked a backlash. The post falsely claimed that Joseph Stalin, the communist leader of the Soviet Union until 1953; Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi party in Germany; and Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic of China, didn’t cause the deaths of millions of people under their watch. Instead, the post said, their public sector workers did. Mr. Musk shared the post without any other comment. He removed it soon after users on X criticized the post, saying it was antisemitic and dismissive of genocide. Historians have widely chronicled that millions of people died under Stalin, that millions of Jews were massacred under Hitler during the Holocaust, and that millions of Chinese were displaced or killed during Mao’s cultural revolution. It was the latest post by Mr. Musk to devolve into controversy. In 2023, Mr. Musk endorsed an antisemitic post on X as “the …

Musk’s never been more powerful so why are Tesla shares tanking? | Automotive Industry News

Published by Sam

The “bromance” between United States President Donald Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk was on full display on Tuesday when the White House South Lawn was transformed into a miniature Tesla showroom. Musk lined up Tesla cars to showcase the electric car producer’s latest innovations while Trump promised to brand anyone vandalising a Tesla car a “domestic terrorist” following reports of a spate of vandalism and arson attacks on Tesla cars across the country. Trump, known for his strong stance on domestic manufacturing and business leadership, has given Musk a prominent role in his new administration as leader of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which claims to have uncovered “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse” in the US federal government – claims for which Musk and Trump have yet to show significant evidence. Meanwhile, Tesla shares, which are listed on the NASDAQ, are floundering. On Monday this week, they plummeted by 15 percent to end the day at $215 – the worst day for the stock since 2020 and …

How Generative A.I. Complements the MAGA Style

Published by skeptic

A man who looks like Musk, only 20 years younger and better rested, eats hummus before another cut to belly dancers with large breasts, shapely hips and full beards. This jarring sequence brings us to the chorus: “Trump Gaza, shining bright/golden future, a brand-new light/feast and dance, the deed is done/Trump Gaza, No. 1.” As the chorus repeats, we enter the “after” portion of the spot. A child walks down a shining boulevard, holding a Mylar balloon shaped like the president’s head. The president himself chats up a younger woman in a casino. Money falls from the sky. The aforementioned golden statue stands at the center of a busy roundabout, and Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu drink cocktails with their shirts off by a pool. The whole thing is prime generative A.I. It’s competently hacky, more technically proficient than what most people could produce, but also deranged in the Patrick Bateman style, as though an automaton had decided what humans like by watching thousands of commercials — which is, of course, exactly what happened. …

Elon Musk Says X Outages Were Caused by a Cyberattack From Ukraine

Published by skeptic

Elon Musk is facing questions about how much attention he is paying to his businesses as he advises President Trump on the direction of the federal government. The questions have mounted as Mr. Musk’s business empire — which includes the electric car maker Tesla, the social media site X and the rocket maker SpaceX — has run into challenges. On Monday, users of X reported widespread outages. The same day, Tesla’s stock fell more than 15 percent amid concerns that include declining electric vehicle sales and politically driven protests against the manufacturer. And last week, a SpaceX rocket exploded in Florida during launch, showering some places with debris. Mr. Musk on Monday quickly blamed the X issues on a cyberattack stemming from Ukraine, without providing evidence. He posted on X that Democratic donors were responsible for seeding protests against Tesla, again without evidence. In response to the SpaceX explosion, he said on X: “Rockets are hard.” Questions about Mr. Musk’s continuing oversight of his companies are coming to a head as he spends more time …

TikTok Is Back in US App Stores

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Twenty-six days after it was banished from US app stores, TikTok has returned to the iOS App Store and Google Play store. Apple and Google brought back the Chinese-owned video app after receiving a letter from US attorney general Pam Bondi assuring the companies they would not be fined for hosting it, Bloomberg first reported Thursday. Google confirmed to WIRED it has brought TikTok back, but didn’t immediately elaborate on the reason. Apple, TikTok, and the Department of Justice didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. Bondi was sworn into office last week. The return concludes a fraught few weeks for TikTok. The platform disappeared from US app stores and went dark for users nationwide on January 19, hours before the ban went into effect. It sputtered back to life later that day, after TikTok executives received their own assurances from then president-elect Donald Trump that he would provide more time for a resolution to be reached. If you already had the app on your phone, it was functioning normally by that same afternoon. After …

Her Discovery Wasn’t Alien Life, but Science Has Never Been the Same

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With TV cameras pointed at her, Felisa Wolfe-Simon began speaking at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 2, 2010. “I’ve discovered — I’ve led a team that has discovered — something that I’ve been thinking about for many years,” Dr. Wolfe-Simon said. She was at that time a visiting researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey, speaking to a sizable audience of journalists and bloggers, two of them wearing tinfoil hats, and hordes of streamers online. Days before, NASA had teased “an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.” Speculation that NASA had discovered some kind of alien life bred exponentially across nascent social media platforms. Dr. Wolfe-Simon had, unfortunately, not found aliens, nor had she ever said she did. But she had found a terrestrial organism that was behaving unlike any life form known on Earth. The creature came from the mud of Mono Lake, a body of water near Yosemite National Park that is nearly three times as salty as the Pacific Ocean. The lake has the pH …

Elon Musk and JD Vance Agree On Rehiring DOGE Employee Who Wrote He Was “Racist Before It Was Cool”

Published by Sam

Elon Musk said on Friday that he plans to rehire the Department of Government Efficiency employee who resigned after racist comments he made online were revealed by The Wall Street Journal. The staff member, 25-year-old Marko Elez, posted messages such as “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” and “Normalize Indian hate,” according to the Journal. Early Friday, Musk—the richest man in the world whose influence in Washington has grown with concerning speed following President Donald Trump’s election—asked his X followers if he should rehire Elez, referring to him as a DOGE “staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now-deleted pseudonym.” More than two-thirds of respondents said yes to the poll, which garnered 385,247 votes. Elon Musk speaks with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump as they watch the launch of the sixth test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket on November 19, 2024 in Brownsville, Texas. SpaceX’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk, a Trump confidante, has been tapped to lead the new …

Meta Settles a Million Trump Lawsuit Because It Had More to Lose by Winning

Meta Settles a $25 Million Trump Lawsuit Because It Had More to Lose by Winning

Published by Sam

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta will pay roughly $25 million to settle a 2021 lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump, who accused the platform of unlawfully suspending his accounts after the Capitol insurrection. The Wall Street Journal reported that most of the money will fund Trump’s presidential library, with the rest covering legal fees and other plaintiffs. Meta won’t admit wrongdoing, and experts widely agree Trump was unlikely to win: the judge in this case, like the one in a similar failed suit against Twitter, appeared openly skeptical of his arguments. But Meta arguably had more to lose by winning this one. Tech and media companies, eager to avoid conflict with the new administration, have recently settled a string of Trump lawsuits they probably would have won in court. According to the Journal, this settlement, in particular, grew out of Zuckerberg’s efforts to cozy up to Trump last November. The paper’s sources said the then-president-elect signaled during a Mar-a-Lago dinner that the Meta boss would need to resolve the suit before he could ever be allowed “into …

TikTok Ban and Trump Executive Order Lead to Tech Company Dilemma

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For more than six years, Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud computing company, provided technical support to deliver TikTok videos to tens of millions of Americans. But over the weekend, Amazon faced a dilemma. A new law was taking effect banning TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, in the United States. Tech companies were barred from distributing and updating it or they would face financial penalties. At the same time, President-elect Donald J. Trump was telling tech companies he planned to pause enforcement of the law with an executive order. Just hours before the ban took effect, Amazon appeared to comply with the law, according to a New York Times review of the way TikTok’s web traffic is handled. Instead, Akamai Technologies, a Massachusetts-based company that was already helping to deliver TikTok videos to phones, took over more of the technical support. The change, which was picked up by digital forensics conducted by The Times, was one of the small behind-the scenes-maneuvers that showed how tech companies have diverged in their approach to …

The Who’s Who of MAGA Influencers You Should Know About by Now

Published by skeptic

Over the weekend, I went to DC to meet with all of the right-wing influencers and content creators who made President Donald Trump’s 2024 win possible. They were everywhere. The 2024 election was the influencer election and inauguration was no different: There were dozens of pre- and post-inaugural parties and balls this weekend, as well as the big event itself. Theo Von sat in front of Jake and Logan Paul under the Capitol rotunda (well, until the podcaster’s chair collapsed). Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, and Brett Cooper walked the Turning Point USA red carpet and posed for selfies with fans. Jessic Reed Kraus, writer of the HouseInhabit newsletter, hung out with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the Make America Healthy Again ball Monday night. In August, I published a guide on the Republican and Democratic influencers shaping the 2024 election. The influencers and content creators still matter, and they will be communicating and guiding policy decisions for years to come. Welcome to Trump 2.0, where these creators have the ears not only of their audiences …