Chex n balances
Why does Musk have so much power over the government and how can it be taken away?
…the billionaire tanked a bipartisan spending deal in the House last week and sent lawmakers scrambling.
Musk torched the plan to his 200 million followers on X, the social media platform he owns, and President-elect Donald Trump called on Republicans to reject the deal.
That’s part of the answer – he owns TwitterX and he abuses the power that gives him.
Musk was one of Trump’s biggest benefactors on the campaign trail and has been attached to the president-elect since his victory — weighing in on Cabinet appointments, meeting with foreign leaders and, increasingly, swaying dealmaking in Congress.
And that’s another part. Trump is stupid and weak, and Musk abuses the power that gives him.
But Musk’s ill-defined role raises questions about the unchecked influence of billionaires. He was not elected by voters or given a role in the new administration that’s subject to ethics rules or congressional oversight. And he’s vowed to fund primary challengers for lawmakers who don’t fall in line.
It’s not so much an ill-defined role as not a role at all. He’s just doing what he can get away with, and what he can get away with appears to be unlimited.
Who could have possibly imagined there would ever come a time when we would look back fondly on the days of Jared and Ivanka?
Ok let’s not go crazy here.
Likely he is not abusing that power. The influence of his Tweets comes from the fact that 200 million people choose to follow him, and vast number of people interact with his Tweets. He was the biggest account (in terms of user interactions) prior to buying Twitter, and still is. There’s no evidence that he has rigged Twitter (or that the algorithm is biased). It seems to be the politically neutral platform that he promised.
[Of course many people are so used to only a narrow range of viewpoints being acceptable and presented, that they think there’s something wrong if it’s not like that.]
Well good. I’d rather have Musk influencing things than Trump.
Yeah and I’d rather have an asteroid strike than climate change. Fun choices.
You haven’t looked.
He apparently gets quite cross if people refer to him as Vice-President to President Musk. So it will be a good idea to continue doing it long enough for him to dump Musk.
@Holms:
Yes, actually, I have looked.
Here’s the story you point to told a bit more neutrally:
1) In early 2023, being not long after Musk had taken over Twitter, they were making a lot of changes to the algorithm, changing things, breaking things.
2) In Feb 2023, Musk, while using his own account, noticed something that seemed wrong that was affecting visibility (one would indeed by likely to first notice something wrong while using one’s own account).
3) Musk pointed this out to his team, and they held meetings about it.
4) One Twitter engineer, either as a joke, or out of exasperation with Musk (I can imagine that he can be very exasperating to work for), added a thousand-times boost to the visibility of Musk’s Tweets. For a few hours Musk’s Tweets flooded Twitter timelines.
5) By the next day: (a) a bug that had indeed been in the algorithm affecting visibility had been found and fixed, and (b) the artificial 1000x boost had been removed.
… and that was the end of the drama.
Is that all you’re pointing to?
Here’s a serious question on which I’m quite open to persuasion: Can you point to any evidence that the Twitter algorithm as it is now, or as it has been in 2024 and through the election, is either politically biased or giving an artificial boost to Musk’s Tweets (as opposed to boosting Tweets based on followers and interactions)?
Coel: You’re missing my point. I don’t mean Musk is manipulating Twitter, I simply mean he’s abusing the added power it gives him to dominate the political landscape.
Ah, neutrality. Meaning of course your personal opinion, as opposed to witness accounts of people present at those interactions.
You call the algorithm change the joke or exasperation of an engineer, sparing Elon from responsibility for those changes, with no evidence to bear that out. Yet certain things are just facts: Elon called a meeting because the president of USA had more eyeballs on his tweets. A person suggesting maybe Elon’s celebrity had peaked was fired. Elon’s cousin and apparently person of high influence within the company called it a matter of ‘high urgency’ that Biden’s tweets were more popular. More firings were threatened. A team made of “roughly 80” engineers (as opposed to just one) got to work. They made changes to the algorithm, massively boosting visibility of Elon’s tweets. The boost to his visibility was reduced (as opposed to your claim that they were reverted) only after a storm of derision broke out.
Also, no documentation of a bug affecting Elon’s visibility had been found… other than the one he introduced in his own favour, of course.
P.S.
Your claims of neutrality when speaking of Elon are hilarious.
@Holms:
You seem to be assuming that the account you’re giving — which all comes from one journalist — is neutral and un-hyped.
Anyhow, whatever happened during one particular a week in Feb 2023, I note that you’re not presenting evidence of ongoing political or pro-Musk bias in the Twitter algorithm, as it has been through 2024 and is now.
Twitter, as it is now, does seem to be the neutral, free-speech platform that Musk promised. Which is good.
Correction: two journalists. Meanwhile your account comes from… you. A single not journalist.
As for the present:
“In Phase One, focused on Elon Musk’s account, the analysis identified a marked differential uplift across all engagement metrics (view counts, retweet counts, and favourite counts) following the detected change point. Musk’s account not only started with a higher baseline compared to the other accounts in the analysis but also received a significant additional boost post-change, indicating a potential algorithmic adjustment that preferentially enhanced visibility and interaction for Musk’s posts.”
It took less than two minutes to track this down. You didn’t look.