U.S. Senators Cory Booker and Bob Menendez (both D-NJ) are asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Twitter for the “will disregard for the safety and security of its users.”
By John Heinis/Hudson County View
“We write regarding Twitter’s serious, willful disregard for the safety and security of its users, and encourage the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate any breach of Twitter’s consent decree or other violations of our consumer protection laws,” the senators wrote in a letter to FTC Chair Lina Khan yesterday.
“In recent weeks, Twitter’s new Chief Executive Officer, Elon Musk, has taken alarming
steps that have undermined the integrity and safety of the platform, and announced new features despite clear warnings those changes would be abused for fraud, scams, and dangerous impersonation.”
They also drew attention to the fact that Twitter executives responsible for privacy and cybersecurity resigned last week, along with “campaigns of racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic harassment” since Musk has taken over.
Last night, many Twitter users suspected that the platform may be going offline all together after approximately 1,200 employees left last night, per the New York Times, which came after musk had laid off about half of the staff – about 3,700 employees.
This morning, Musk tweeted a picture of two rhinoceroses having sex with the caption “FTX losing over a billion dollars of client funds,” with a photographer in the foreground of the same photo with the caption “Senators calling for the FTC to investigate Twitter.”
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2022
A few hours later, Musk announced that the accounts of Kathy Griffin, Jorden Petersen, and the Babylon Bee had been reinstated, before then revealing the platform’s new “freedom of speech” policy.
“New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach. Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter,” he wrote.
“You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet.”
Musk, the world’s richest man who is also the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, purchased Twitter for $44 billion last month.
His rollout of Twitter Blue, purchasing “verified” checkmarks for $8, was halted after just a few days do to a number of impersonation scams of prominent figures.
Meanwhile, Menendez is in the midst of his own probe, as federal prosecutors look into whether or his his wife received gifts or services from individuals who sought favors from New Jersey’s senior senator, as The Wall Street Journal reported.
Joining Sens. Menendez and Booker in signing the letter were U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Ed Markey (D-Mass.)
Meanwhile, they don’t even want to look at the Biden Crime Family nor SBF at FTX who is this century’s Bernie Madoff stealing billions. Oh yeah, Sam Bankman Fried gave Democrats about $39 million this election cycle for protection, I mean election races.
Are these lowlife pols targeting speech obvious or what. Look how low they go!
Hey Bob, why don’t you investigate your son being paid HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS from SBF at FTX!?
It took a lot of money to get someone like Booker and Bob’s kid into office.
Typical Booker, she grabs a headline with FBI target Big Bob meanwhile FTX ran a ponzi scheme ruining people’s entire retirements and they want to go after a dumb APP!
https://www.axios.com/2022/11/15/ftz-crypto-bankman-fried-democrats-midterms-campaigns
#CoryMustGo
But NJ’s Senator Booker is not done backing outright fascism. Now he’s out shilling for another Woke Capitalist, the convicted mega-criminal Elizabeth Holmes:
https://twitter.com/JenniferSey/status/1593652787472003072?s=20&t=-h40MN1M95Br3ETr5qQdWQ
George Carlin once riffed, “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.”
Hey, you can be a virtue-signaling sheep and “baaaa” your approval as they rig every aspect of the country all while pulling the plug on your civil and economic rights. They’re not done.
238 out of 7500, give or take, fired at the whim of Sir Elon Gasbag. Who would want work for an abusive Trump-lite? 238 employees is far too few to keep the site up and running probably beyond this weekend.
Say your prayers for the Blue Bird! R.I.P.
Apocryphal. But it’s a serious mess and everyone is projecting their political bias onto it. People who know where software babies actually come from know Musk has created an unsustainable situation. Idiots on the right who think this is just about woke vs free speech are beyond clueless about the business of software and in particular the business of social media.
The product in social media is YOU. You participate in social media. You are the thing to be sold. You are sold to advertisers who want your attention. That’s it, the business in a nutshell. Advertisers for reasons having nothing whatever to do with “woke” will leave if the environment becomes a dicey place in which to advertise their wares. Two current examples.
1) A lack of security caused by the sudden loss of too much institutional knowledge.
2) A deteriorating environment in which their ads may find themselves wedged between comments using the n-word, swastikas, hateful back and forth.
A publicly traded corporation won’t stay if they don’t have guarantees that 1 and 2 are well in hand. Right now it is very hard for Musk to say they are well in hand. Idiots think it has to do with woke vs not woke. No, it has to do with capitalism. It’s always fun to discover how little the right knows about capitalism while never missing a chance to squawk about communism. Which they also know very little about.
Aside from being usually reliable votes for the usually good Dem agenda, NJ deserves better than our ethically challenged senior senator and empty suit junior senator. Both of these guys need to be primaried by genuine progressives not owned by their skeevy pals or big pharma.
Booker’s going to bat for sociopathic grifter Elizabeth “Deep Voice Steve Jobs Turtleneck” Holmes was disgusting.
Roman has a very limited vocabulary and tries to make up for it with hyperbole. When he uses the words fascist, communist, stasi – he just means “Roman no like, Roman think it’s bad.” It has nothing to do with actual fascism or communism. Just in case you were worried.