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Elon Musk

How Elon Musk Is Aiding The US’ Regime Change Operation In Iran

January 18, 2023 Alan MacLeod, Mintpress News. , , ,
Elon Musk has announced that he is helping to smuggle hundreds of Starlink satellite communications devices into Iran. The South African-born billionaire made the admission on December 26, replying to a tweet lauding female Iranian protesters for refusing to cover their hair. “Approaching 100 Starlinks active in Iran”, he tweeted, clearly implying a political motivation to his work. That Musk is involved in Washington’s attempts to weaken or overthrow the administration in Tehran has been clear for some months now. In September – at the height of the demonstrations following the suspicious death of 22-year-old Iranian woman Mahsa Amini – Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced that the U.S. was “taking action” “to advance Internet freedom and the free flow of information for the Iranian people” and “to counter the Iranian government’s censorship,” to which Musk replied, “Activating Starlink…”

Under Musk, Twitter Continues To Promote US Propaganda Networks

January 8, 2023 Bryce Greene, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. , , , ,
Elon Musk’s controlled release of the documents known as the “Twitter Files” has given us some insight into the inner workings of the social media platform. The batch of docs released on December 20 is arguably the most explosive, detailing Twitter’s deliberate shielding of US propaganda operations. After getting limited access to Twitter‘s internal systems, Lee Fang of the Intercept (12/20/22) detailed how Twitter staff “whitelisted” accounts run by US Central Command (CENTCOM), the unit of the US military that oversees the Middle East, as part of covert propaganda campaigns. In other words, Twitter protected accounts engaged in US psychological warfare operations, even though they clearly violated the platform’s terms of service.

FBI Cointelpro Is Back And Worse Than Ever

January 1, 2023 James Bovard, Counter Punch. , , ,
Elon Musk has opened the floodgates to expose the FBI’s latest war on Americans’ freedom of speech.  The FBI massively intervened to pressure Twitter to suppress accounts and tweets from individuals the FBI disapproved, including parody accounts.  The FBI and other federal agencies also browbeat Facebook, Instagram, and many other tech companies. Thus far, most of the American media has ignored or downplayed the story, known as the Twitter Files. Since many of the individuals who the FBI got squelched were pro-Trump, the violation of their rights is a non-issue – or a cause for quiet celebration.  At this point, it is difficult to know whether the scant reaction to the Twitter Files is the result of political bias, collective amnesia, or simply a total ignorance of American history.

‘Free Speech’ Is Whatever The Rich Say It Is

December 25, 2022 Adam Johnson, The Real News Network. , , , , ,
It’s been a banner month for people who love invoking the “free speech” buzzword. Whether Elon Musk was promoting it as a catch-all abstract value to justify inviting transphobes and neo-nazis back to Twitter, or mainstream journalists were invoking the idea in response to a petulant billionaire banning his critics from the large social media company he just purchased for $44 billion, everyone these past few weeks has had some opinion on “free speech,” what it means, and who its supposed champion—or, more often than not, its most hypocritical defender—truly is. What the conversation has been largely lacking (other than a coherent definition of “free speech”) is a serious acknowledgment that free speech as a concept means very little if we don’t discuss how massive asymmetries in the distribution of power and the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a tiny few effectively determine who has the right to speak freely and who doesn’t.

Elon Musk’s Takeover Through The Eyes Of Twitter’s Janitors

December 14, 2022 Teddy Ostrow, In These Times. , , ,
San Francisco, California - Billionaire Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has captured headlines for its tumultuous effect on the company’s corporate staff and the risks it poses to the platform’s future survival. But Musk’s acquisition also has dire, albeit underreported, consequences for the service staff who keep the blue bird humming. In These Times spoke to four janitors who say that all 20 custodial workers at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters lost their jobs on December 5 because Twitter’s new custodial contractor refused to rehire them. The move comes less than two months after Musk, who bought Twitter on October 27, fired several senior executives and later roughly 3,700 employees ranging from engineers to communications workers to content moderators—half the company’s staff—on November 4.

The Twitter Files

December 4, 2022 Matt Taibbi, Scheer Post. , , , , , ,
The following is a thread of Tweets written by Matt Taibbi on Dec. 2 about Twitter’s content moderation practices—specifically dealing with the Hunter Biden laptop story—after being given internal documents by Elon Musk. Outlets like USA Today have reported they have not been able to verify the authenticity of the emails. The thread was promoted by Musk stating “The public deserves to know what really happened …” The “Twitter Files” tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer.

Workers Built Twitter — They Should Own It, Not Elon Musk

November 28, 2022 Kyle Thibodeau and Rose Lemlich, Left Voice. , , , ,
Let’s be clear: Elon Musk has no idea how the software that runs Twitter actually works. He has made it abundantly clear that he has not even a basic understanding of how a website like Twitter functions under the hood, or how it was built, or what Twitter workers do all day. On his first day in the office, he demanded that workers print out their code so that he could review it himself, apparently under the impression that a 16-year-old social media site with a system architecture made up of dozens if not hundreds of component pieces of software, each made up of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of lines of code, could be remotely consumable by a single person kicked back in a La-Z-Boy for light bedtime reading.

A Promising Challenge To The World’s Richest Man

November 23, 2022 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. , , ,
A good day’s work for a good day’s pay. Should this age-old wisdom define how our workplaces here in the 21st century go about compensating work? More to the point: Should our corporations start applying this common-sense standard across the board, to both front-line workers and our most powerful corporate CEOs? Kathaleen McCormick will soon let us know, in a turn of events that must have the richest man in the known universe — Elon Musk — more than a little bit uneasy. McCormick currently serves as the chancellor — top judge — in what amounts to Corporate America’s top go-to judicial body, Delaware’s little-known Court of Chancery. Why does corporate law so often come down to what judges in Delaware say that law should be?

Mass Twitter Walkout

November 18, 2022 Timothy Karr, Free Press. , , ,
On Thursday, hundreds of Twitter employees left the company, further depleting a workforce needed to maintain the integrity of the site and its content-moderation system. This follows Musk’s layoffs of half the Twitter staff, and a series of high-profile departures from key Twitter trust and safety; security; privacy; and compliance personnel. Musk had given Twitter's employees until 5 p.m. ET, Thursday, to decide whether they wanted to commit to his employment terms, which included a call to be “extremely hardcore” and work very long hours. Refusing to do so would effectively signal resignation, according to an email Musk sent to staff Wednesday. Upon seeing that few had accepted his terms by Thursday afternoon, Twitter decided to close company offices through Mon., Nov. 21.

The Road To Hell, Brought To You By Liberalism

May 9, 2022 Danny Haiphong, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
Elon Musk successfully won his bid to purchase Twitter on April 25th just days after a rally in New York City chanted “Azov” to express support for Ukraine. While these events appear unrelated on the surface, they represent key examples of the road to hell paved by U.S. imperialism’s dominant ideology: liberalism. Liberalism is often viewed as the most progressive political ideology of the prevailing social order in the West. In actuality, liberalism is the driving ideological force of capitalist and imperialist expansionism. Liberal ideology is characterized by the fetishization of racism, individualism, and the political preconditions necessary for the expansion of capitalism. Once a kick-starter for the explosive growth of capital, liberalism has devolved into an ideology that defends the rule of the rich at any and all cost.

The Push For Nuclear Power In Space

December 17, 2020 Karl Grossman, OpEd News. , , ,
Last week a SpaceX rocket exploded in a fireball at the SpaceX site in Texas. "Fortunately," reported Lester Holt on NBC Nightly News, "no one was aboard." But what if nuclear materials had been aboard? The nuclear space issue is one I got into 35 years ago when I learned from reading a U.S. Department of Energy news letter about two space shuttles, one the Challenger which was to be launched the following year with 24.2 pounds of plutonium aboard. The plutonium the shuttles were to carry aloft in 1986 was to be used as fuel in radioisotope thermoelectric generators RTGs that were to provide a small amount of electric power for instruments on space probes to be released from the shuttles once the shuttles achieved orbit.

‘We Will Coup Whoever We Want’

July 31, 2020 By Vijay Prashad and Alejandro Bejarano,  Globetrotter. , , ,
On July 24, 2020, Tesla’s Elon Musk wrote on Twitter that a second U.S. “government stimulus package is not in the best interests of the people.” Someone responded to Musk soon after, “You know what wasn’t in the best interest of people? The U.S. government organizing a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia so you could obtain the lithium there.” Musk then wrote: We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it. Musk refers here to the coup against President Evo Morales Ayma, who was removed illegally from his office in November 2019. Morales had just won an election for a term that was to have begun in January 2020. Even if there was a challenge against that election, Morales’ term should rightfully have continued through November and December of 2019.
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