Musk stiffing Google could unleash yet more abuse on Twitter, report says
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I remember when Facebook attempted this.
It's not only Elon who knows how not to pay the bills.
And this was pretty much the result.
It's not only Elon who knows how not to pay the bills.
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If the contract is at an end...is it really 'cutting them off'? Its business, choose better. Musk should understand its just business, no?
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Yep. That's what most of the fraudsters tried to do when I worked at Google: pay for their scam ads with stolen credit cards. Fortunately, we had a very good payment fraud / "risk" team that was very good at catching them before we let them spend a dime.
I really doubt that Twitter even has a fraud prevention team anymore. I shudder to think about the number of credit card chargebacks they're going to be dealing with.
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It's not that uncommon. A friend of mine was an attorney specializing in construction contractors suing each other over unpaid bills. He made enough money to retire early.
Also, in a previous job I ran across a scam artist who ran this simple scam: Start a subscription based business with high revenue potential, advertise heavily and sign up a bunch of customers, collect the revenue but don't pay any bills, when people get wise to what's going on pack it in and move to another state and do it again.
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Exactly this.
Ever since the $8 "verification" fee was add, a blue check has become equivalent to the old "firstname bunchofnumbers" IDs.
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You're giving way to much credibility to the things that come out of Musk's mouth.
Yes, it would be the largest failed social media company in history, though that's not shocking, most that have failed did so in the early days of social media. This would absolutely be the most well established social media company to ever fail.
That said, the Twitter name will continue to maintain some form of value, even if the site is completely off line and all source code is obliterated. It'll never be worth $0, or at least never within the next 20 years.
But Tesla and SpaceX aren't suffering for his absence. They're suffering because all Musk really brought to the table was investment, and his reputation. His reputation brought in young talented engineers in droves, he'd wring everything he could out of them, and then recruit from the new batch of young talented engineers coming in behind them when they got burned out and left. His reputation was already suffering prior to the takeover of Twitter, but it's taken a pretty massive hit since that takeover. No doubt, both Tesla and SpaceX are having a harder time recruiting today than they had a year ago. It'll get harder if he leaves Twitter to come back into more heavy rotation at either business. SpaceX has and will continue to manage - there's not a whole lot of other options for people who want to work on a rocket that actually goes into space, and he seemingly did a better job there than anywhere else of trusting other leadership (namely, Shotwell). But Tesla seems to already be suffering from a lack of talent - go read the article about the current state of the Cyber Truck.
Acquiring Twitter wasn't about money - but neither was it about taking a loss. He had ideological ideas for what he wanted to do with Twitter, he just assumed that he'd do those things and the money would just appear. He didn't really understand the business when he made the offer, and he didn't really understand the difference in the intervening months before he took over, and he has learned very little, but not nothing, about the business since he took over.
What he did learn was that it actually was an advertising business, and changing that model wasn't going to be easy. That's precisely why he hired Yaccarino. And, it's the most savvy thing he's done since he bought the place. With her industry connections, she can probably get some advertisers to come back with a handshake. Deals at this scale are about relationships as much as anything. But at the moment, Musk's general air of chaos around the business is likely to make the job difficult for her on an ongoing basis.
In any event, he leveraged himself in ways that could hurt Tesla if Twitter continues to lose money. He has creditors, and those creditors have a claim on Tesla stock, and on money that Musk would have to sell Tesla stock to raise. There's zero chance that he expected that or is in any way OK with it - but it's the position he put himself in. If Twitter makes a loss permanently, Musk will cut his losses at some point, just to salvage what he can of his money.
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If this does result in more porn in general and CSAM specifically showing up on Twitter in easily found places...
When do the credit card companies yank the ability for Twitter to process payments from blue checks? Or is that not going to happen because there's no real "moral majority" outrage with Twitter showing boobies and CSAM since they get to spew their vile hatred on the same platform without consequence?
When do the credit card companies yank the ability for Twitter to process payments from blue checks? Or is that not going to happen because there's no real "moral majority" outrage with Twitter showing boobies and CSAM since they get to spew their vile hatred on the same platform without consequence?
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Oh, and one more thing, Musk recently tweeted about possibly removing the block function in Twitter because large block lists costs more server resources and he's asked users to delete their block lists. If he follows through, now all that hate speech won't be able to be blocked by legitimate users.
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I still see plenty, but they are definitely lower quality or new brands. I block way more than I used to. Even if they are placing them, they have to be charging less.
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Snarky Robot
Ars Legatus Legionis
You're right, we should laugh at people who think printing your own money is smart! What are they gonna do, buy a printing press? Pft. They'd probably do something even dumber, like make it a digital currency powered by destroying the earth.
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IncorrigibleTroll
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
Yep. That's what most of the fraudsters tried to do when I worked at Google: pay for their scam ads with stolen credit cards. Fortunately, we had a very good payment fraud / "risk" team that was very good at catching them before we let them spend a dime.
I really doubt that Twitter even has a fraud prevention team anymore. I shudder to think about the number of credit card chargebacks they're going to be dealing with.
I'm not terribly familiar with payment processing systems; is it safe to assume that chargebacks are not something that Elon can toss on the "Do not pay" pile?
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I'm sure block lists take up a lot less space and resources than long form tweets and long form video.
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Musk seems to think that everyone going there is paying for the privilege themselves with a subscription.
Considering the traffic there is probably very low for paid accounts vs the casual "click on the link in the news post" folks who want to read it for themselves, alienating advertisers was about as brain dead of a move as he could have possibly done.
Musk has basically slashed Twitter's throat while attempting to hang it from a high bridge, cutting the rope and put it into freefall, bleeding all the way down. I don't know why anyone thinks the guy's a genius. From where I sit, it seems like he didn't drink at all, let alone deeply, from the cup of intelligence.
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When he bought Twitter, had he NOT killed APIs, I would have gladly paid $8/month to use Tweetbot to view Twitter. Maybe more... it was the primary way I consumed news. Instead, he's gone around Trump-style not paying his bills, and axed all the folks with no notice (after promising they'd keep their jobs).... all the while trashing anybody and everybody who challenges him. I quit Twitter when they killed Tweetbot, but at the rate he's going, it's not even going to survive long enough to make Ars annual Deathwatch lists. Hope that new CEO got her severance up front when it inevitably doesn't work out.
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Yeah, it's bullshit. Musk originally broached the subject because someone whined to him about being blocked (probably one if his adoring MAGA asshat followers). The real issue with removing the block function is that is one of the tools a Twitter user has to stop harassment, stalking, etc.
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My experience is on the inbound side, but not really as far as I understand. It's either automatic, or if Musk refused, they could literally turn off the ability for Musk to accept CC charges.
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I was actually thinking more like Leona Helmsley but close enough I guess.
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I use Twitter for sports coverage mostly - and frankly that experience hasn't changed much. But comments on anything else is pretty much a non-stop onslaught of blue-check MAGA ethno-fascists, rendering comments meaningless, with no reason to interact.
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And lots of really obvious bots have checks, because stolen cards. "We sacked all our bothunters" is the reason it keeps on getting worse.
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Merchant fees are usually withheld from the payouts so it is pretty hard to avoid paying them. Merchant providers / payment processors are very good at limiting their risk and ensuring they don’t get stuck with the bill. They have experience with far better scam artist and fraudsters than Musk.
There are also thresholds for fraud before your rates go up or you get cutoff from the merchant provider. In Twitter’s case, it is less likely they’d get cut off without notice unless it goes spectacularly wrong.
They are always merchant providers who will give them safe haven for a while. So they can vendor hop unless Visa and Mastercard cut them off or banks stop underwriting them. But that would only happen if there was enough political pressure due to porn or csam and I suspect that there are many other things that would cause Twitter to go dark before all that.
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Who among us, I ask you, has not gotten blasted on drugs and announced to the world that a market-shaking deal has been made when it actually hasn't?
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Seeing that the claim is that large block lists increase server costs my guess is a crappy implementation that sucks processor power. Which wouldn't be too strange if something that is intended for use for (lets do an ass pull) up to a 1000 entries per Twitter user gets scaled up to millions.
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If the pedos are paying for Twitter Blue so they can find/download child porn, the police are going to be delighted. That'll make it trivial to do a mass bust with minimal investigative work. Especially compared to taking down a darknet site.
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Like the old joke:
A plane is flying the red-eye NY to LA, and is halfway through the flight when the pilot announces “Ladies and gentlemen, we have lost power to one of our engines. There’s nothing to worry about, as the remaining engines have more than enough power to keep the plane in flight, but this will add an hour to our flight time.”
An hour later, the pilot makes another announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, we have lost power to one of our engines. There’s nothing to worry about, as the remaining engines have more than enough power to keep the plane in flight, but this will add an hour to our flight time.”
And another hour later, the pilot makes another announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, we have lost power to one of our engines. There’s nothing to worry about, as the remaining engines have more than enough power to keep the plane in flight, but this will add an hour to our flight time.”
At which point, one of the passengers says to his companion, “We’d better not lose another engine, or we’ll be up here all night!”
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