World famous free speech connoisseur and noted antisemite Elon Musk's very expensive social media network took a really interesting stand this week by kicking off a journalist for covering spam rather than the spammer they exposed.
Techdirt does an excellent job of walking us through just how weird a decision by Xitter this bad call is, but it seems very in character: "kill the messenger" seems a very Muskian team management more. Séamas O'Reilly published a column about spam and scams running wild online. O'Reilly incidentally mentioned Xitter in the post. Hours later, permabanned. Xitter did not ban the spam scammer he pointed out.
The piece isn't really about ExTwitter, but among the many things it mentions is ExTwitter, in noting that in response to an earlier column O'Reilly had written, a bluecheck scammer replied to the column being posted there, pushing people to pay for porn videos:
Sometimes, the effects are merely comical. Last week's edition of this column was an explainer on the Stormont deadlock, on the eve of its being broken by the DUP.
Now, I will admit I considered this a perfectly lucid and entertaining bit of writing, but an X user was so moved by its analysis that she replied, immediately, with a payment link to videos of her porn.
Such tactics are not new, of course, but they are much more regular than they were even a year ago, having been granted greater license by slack regulation.
To take the above incident as just one example, that scam bot had a blue check mark, meaning that, unlike me, it pays money every month to Elon Musk's vastly indebted and unprofitable platform, a situation which would greatly disincentive his company taking proactive measures to weed them out.
That's the entirety of the mention of ExTwitter. But, within a few hours, O'Reilly found that his own account on ExTwitter had been permanently suspended for spam and manipulation.
TechDirt
