Good thread with more coverage of the Vulkan Files

Edit: On a side note, with Twitter only putting "Twitter Blue" users in the "For You" tab, it's likely turning into an easily accessible vector for spreading disinfo, as long as Elmo gets his monthly payment.

> Russian Propagandists Are Using Paid Twitter Blue Checks to Spread Disinformation

Edit 2: Since this is under the Rus/Ukr tag, I might as well add this

> [The Same Russian Agents Who Meddled In US Politics Set The Stage For Ukraine Invasion] (https://talkingpointsmemo.com/prime/the-same-russian-agents-who-meddled-in-us-politics-set-the-stage-for-ukraine-invasion)

And the report the article above is based on

> Preliminary Lessons from Russia’s Unconventional Operations During the Russo- Ukrainian War, February 2022–February 2023 - Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (pdf)

Archive here

> A partnership agreement, obtained exclusively by WIRED, shows not only how current site owner Hiroyuki Nishimura acquired the far-right message board but also how Japanese industry helped finance the deal.

> The text of the deal shows that Nishimura invested $800,000 of his own money, plus $4.8 million from his company—using cash from a major Japanese telecommunications company. But the most surprising part of the deal came from Good Smile Company, which acquired a 30 percent share in 4chan for its $2.4 million investment.

Worth noting that subscribers get promoted over other tweets, which I assume will still hold true even if hiding their status.

Sorry to be pedantic, but it was "Jane, you ignorant slut.". As Jane said, it was a different time.

I don't know why that nickname appeals to me, think it's mostly a knock that he shouldn't be taken nearly as seriously as he thinks he should be.

He did say in Nov (iirc) publicly he was planning the hand off, I thought he was going that route myself, but this report reminded me that after going quiet he said “maybe we might still have an itsy bitsy bot problem on Twitter.”, I'm just not getting it was a war of bot armies, but pure wild ass guessing on my part as well.

Maybe? I'm just guessing by the leave/go post that he has little to know control on how polls break with getting spanked hard. Also not sure how well bots scale to the numbers that took that poll, how many would he have to use to keep it to a 15% loss?

I keep coming to things like his interpretation of Freedom of Speech and the reporters are still being blocked from posting. The man has his blindspots and I think he was honestly shook by the outcome rather than his bot army was that overwhelmed.

A lot of his fan boys, and tbh I kind of think he drank his own koolaid with his love of polls.

Very true, that he's now going with "only blues" voting he's just reinforcing the echo chamber of his threads.

My personal take is after he said he took care of the bots and decided to use polling for his policies, turns out bots are still a problem. Think the "only blues can vote now" was his reaction to that poll.

*New research after Elmo claimed it was all cleaned up.

Very stable.

Archive here. Seriously, don't trust online polls.

> With less than $100, one can buy tens of thousands of votes for Twitter polls using bot-for-hire manipulation services, according to the nonprofit digital rights group Accountable Tech. The finding, first reported by Bloomberg, could spark new concerns about Musk’s reliance on the tool to chart the future of one of the world’s most influential social media companies.

Edit: Should note that this new research is after Elmo said he had cleaned up the bot problem, something that was already hard to believe with all the firings.

Archive here

> Over the summer, a few employees on a ByteDance team responsible for monitoring employee conduct tried to find the sources of suspected leaks of internal conversations and business documents to journalists. In doing so, the employees gained access to the IP addresses and other data of two reporters and a small number of people connected to the reporters via their TikTok accounts. They were trying to determine if those individuals were within proximity of ByteDance employees, according to the company, which added that the efforts failed to find any leaks.