He’s going to kill Twitter, isn’t he?

Musk is off to a rip-roaring start. During his first weekend of Twitter ownership, he fired off a tweet suggesting that the attack on Paul Pelosi was his fault — that it happened in a drunken gay tryst. It was just the worst kind of right wing libel from crazy town.

Elon Musk and a wide range of right-wing personalities cobbled together misreporting, innuendo and outright falsehoods to amplify misinformation about last week’s violent assault on Paul Pelosi to their millions of online followers.

A forum devoted to former White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon’s right-wing radio show alerted its 78,000 subscribers to “very strange new details on Paul Pelosi attack.” Roger Stone, a longtime political consigliere to former president Donald Trump, took to the fast-growing messaging app Telegram to call the assault on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband an “alleged attack,” telling his followers that a “stench” surrounded mainstream reporting about the Friday break-in that left Pelosi, 82, hospitalized with a skull fracture and other serious injuries.

I guess this is where Twitter is going, transitioning to a collection of those lunatic Facebook posts your demented uncle reposts online. Content is going to suck, but also…they call Musk a brilliant businessman? He has no idea what he is doing. He wants to increase the profitability of the platform instantly by charging to get a blue check mark on their account.

Now that he owns Twitter, Elon Musk has given employees their first ultimatum: Meet his deadline to introduce paid verification on Twitter or pack up and leave.

The directive is to change Twitter Blue, the company’s optional, $4.99 a month subscription that unlocks additional features, into a more expensive subscription that also verifies users, according to people familiar with the matter and internal correspondence seen by The Verge. Twitter is planning to charge $19.99 for the new Twitter Blue subscription, though that price is subject to change. Employees working on the project were told on Sunday that they need to meet a deadline of November 7th to launch the feature or they will be fired.

Musk has been clear in the months leading up to his acquisition that he wanted to revamp how Twitter verifies accounts and handles bots. He is also keen on growing subscriptions to become half of the company’s overall revenue. On Sunday, he tweeted: “The whole verification process is being revamped right now.”

This is nuts. For years they’ve given users the ability to get “verified”, that is to have their identities confirmed, which would grant them the glorious reward of having a blue check mark next to their name. That’s it. They never made a good case for what benefit this would provide, other than bragging rights and ego stroking, so I never bothered to apply for it. The features offered by Twitter Blue, and not worth $5/month, let alone $20.

He has also informed Twitter engineers that they must get these boring new features implemented by 7 November, or they’ll be fired. Brilliant.

I was assuming that Musk would let Twitter limp along, making incremental changes, but it looks like his plan is to accelerate the implosion of the company as fast as he can.

That didn’t take long

You know that obscene revolting troll who comes by every once in a while with a new pseudonym, who then drops a torrent of racist, anti-semitic, misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic comments? And then I have to take a few minutes to delete every one of his abusive comments, and ban another pseudonym?

Imagine if I didn’t carry out that last step. Most of you wouldn’t be coming back, and the nastiness would pile up without end until all value in the conversation was lost. Curating and policing the comments section is an essential part of running a site.

Or imagine a grocery store where no workers responded to those “clean up on aisle 5” requests. It would quickly become a filthy, neglected garbage dump that no one would want to shop at.

You can stop imagining. All you need to do is observe Twitter in the near future.

An emboldened cast of anonymous trolls spewed racist slurs and Nazi memes onto Twitter in the hours after billionaire industrialist Elon Musk took over the social network Thursday, raising fears of how his pledge of unrestricted free speech could fuel a new wave of online hate.

Twitter has struggled to enforce its rules against harassment and extremism, and the company has not yet published any broad-scale changes to its content-moderation policies.

But Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” has fiercely criticized the company’s previous leaders as overly rigid and suppressive and said he would work to overturn some of the company’s main enforcement mechanisms, such as indefinitely suspending accounts.

Already. The trolls leapt into furious masturbatory action at the first opportunity.

“Elon now controls twitter. Unleash the racial slurs. K—S AND N—–S,” said one account, using slurs for Jews and Black people. “I can freely express how much I hate n—–s … now, thank you elon,” another said.

Thanks so much, Elon.

One account, created this month, included a Nazi swastika as its profile picture and retweeted quotes from Musk alongside antisemitic memes. Another tweet, showing a video montage glorifying Nazi Germany with the comment, “I hear that there have been some changes around here,” was liked more than 400 times.

Racial slurs were posted rampantly overnight. One single-word tweet, showing a single racial slur in all capital letters, was retweeted more than 500 times and liked more than 4,000 times. It was tweeted at 9 p.m. Thursday night and remained online nearly 12 hours later.

Twitter was never particularly responsive to racist trolling, and I would guess that now, when the employees are looking at only a 1 in 4 chance of being retained, they are even less motivated to do a cleanup. I can tell you as someone who maintains a teeny-tiny site on the internet, keeping it tidy and functional requires constant vigilance.

Hey, advertisers! Unless you’re selling MAGA hats, Confederate flags, and chloroquinone — that is, those kinds of trolls are your customers — I don’t think Twitter is going to be a useful medium for long. The only good part of that sentence is the idea that Musk just burned up $44 billion dollars.

Noted.

Not a great start

You know, all the rich sociopaths have to buy their own social media site to make sure no one can talk about how awful they are. Facebook, Parler, Gab, Gettr, Truth Social, now all absorbed by greedy rich people trying to build cozy little nests for their abhorrent views. Well, Elon Musk now owns Twitter. What is the first thing a committed Free Speech warrior would do, to demonstrate that commitment? How about firing a bunch of people?

Elon Musk became Twitter’s owner late Thursday as his $44 billion deal to take over the company officially closed, marking a new era for one of the world’s most influential social media platforms.

As one of his first moves, he fired several longtime top Twitter executives, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. One of those confirmed the deal was complete.

He has also said he plans to cut the Twitter workforce by 75%. At the same time, he’s been anxious to reassure advertisers that oh no, he’s not going to turn Twitter into a free-for-all hellscape.

After all, he just sank $44 billion into this purchase, he’d rather not see it immediately collapse. Most of that money came from other financial backers, too, and they don’t want to see their investment callapse, either. I expect we’re going to see only slow changes in the service for a while.

Like letting Trump back on.

The one thing I know for sure is that the new ownership is not going to lead to improvements in Twitter. It’s all going to go to shit, with the only question being how quickly. Start preparing for your departure, if you’re on Twitter at all, right now! I’ve had a presence on Mastodon for a long while now, and it’s good, in a lot of ways better, than the bird site, just with less volume and fewer precious celebrities.

Now I’m worried about how to escape a python attack

This poor woman.

Jahrah, a rubber-tapper reportedly in her 50s, had made her way to work at a rubber plantation on Sunday morning.

She was reported missing after failing to return that night, and search parties sent out to find her. A day later villagers found a python with what appeared to be a large stomach.

Locals later killed the snake and found her body inside.

“The victim was found in the snake’s stomach,” Betara Jambi police chief AKP S Harefa told local media outlets, adding that her body appeared to be largely intact when it was found.

I have questions. Pythons don’t move that fast, so how do they catch their prey? They just lie in wait and throw coils over their victim? Speaking from ignorance, that doesn’t seem that dangerous. Pigs have tusks, deer have sharp hooves, humans have knives and machetes — it seems like a good way for the snake to be seriously wounded. How quickly can they constrict? There is another article about how they attack.

They can reach lengths of more than 10m (32ft) and are very powerful. They attack in an ambush, wrapping themselves around their prey and crushing it – squeezing tighter as the victim exhales.

They kill by suffocation or cardiac arrest within minutes.

I guess I’m mystified by the actual, initial process, in the first few seconds of a python attack, which isn’t well explained. How does a 10m long muscular tube leap into action to surprise an animal? I’m missing something in the mechanism.

I’d rather not go to Indonesia and find out in person. Any snake experts able to explain it?