Potemkin Village:
...Something that is made to seem very grand, elaborate, or prosperous for the purposes of impressing others, but which in reality has no real worth or substance. Taken from a story about Russian minister Grigory Potemkin (1739–1791),who allegedly erected false, painted façades to mimic a thriving, successful village along the Dnieper River in Crimea to impress the visiting Empress Catherine II...
****
In his recent in-depth profile of Elon Musk, published in the New Yorker, Ronan Farrow describes how the good Mr. Musk's position on the war in Ukraine evolved over time until, finally...
...In (his)later tweets, Musk portrayed as inevitable an outcome favoring Russia and attached maps highlighting eastern Ukrainian territories, some of which, he argued, “prefer Russia.” Musk also polled his Twitter followers about the plan. Millions responded, with about sixty per cent rejecting the proposal. (Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s President, tweeted his own poll, asking users whether they preferred the Elon Musk who supported Ukraine or the one who now seemed to back Russia. The former won, though Zelensky’s poll had a smaller turnout: Musk has more than twenty times as many followers.)...
But.
Here's the thing.
Mashable recently commissioned an analysis of Mr. Musk's 'followers' on his X-Village Platform formerly known as Twitter:
...Of the 153,209,283 X accounts following Musk at the time the data was collected, around 42 percent of Musk's followers, or more than 65.3 million users, have zero followers on their own account. Just over 72 percent, or nearly 112 million, of these users following Musk have less than 10 followers on their account.
When it comes to content creation on the platform, more than 62.5 million Musk followers have zero tweets...
{snip}
... More than 100 million Musk followers have less than 10 tweets posted to their account...
{snip}
...Musk has recently claimed that X now has more than 540 million "monthly users." If accurate, that means more than 25 percent of accounts on the platform follow Musk. And if those numbers are inflated, it means that even a larger percentage of the entire platform follows Musk. With a huge swath of Musk's 153 million followers not using the platform or perhaps not real, it seems a good portion of X's overall user base may not be so active either.
Imagine that!
.
10 comments:
I receive at least one notification daily on platform X to the effect that I have a new follower, always with 0 or very few followers of their own but purportedly following several hundred to as many as a few thousand. Regular as clockwork. And just as regularly I block them. They are never added to my follower list. I have a suspicion there are no actual unique beings behind each of these accounts.
If these accounts are being generated by, or with the acquiescence of, the good folks at X, and they boost the statistical activity level at said platform to let’s say, lure and bill advertisers, would that constitute fraud?
A most excellent question Lew.
.
Will Musk incorporate "X" into all of his ventures? eg SpaceX
If Elon is involved leave me out. That man is a hazard to the world.
We are now left with the thorny question of what to do with billion/trillionaires of this world.
This class of person has become all powerful, all knowing, gods, who by good fortune and good luck have become so rich.
There are now over 3,000 billionaires on this planet (Wiki) who own a vast majority of the planets wealth. They run governments, they control the media (Facebook fiasco) and like all wealthy people, the lust after more money, more fame, more and more and they have the revenue to guarantee it.
In my book, we must take apart their financial empires and curb their control and we must ensure that they pay their fair share of taxes and not hide behind layers of accountants and paper pushers.
If we do not try to curb their empires, we will diminish as a society and any though of democracy is tossed out the window, because we made the billionaire and trillionaire false gods.
I would ban Facebook altogether; twitter is for twits and remember, 25 years ago they did not exist and we got along quite well.
NVG--
Apparently EM also uses the the 24th letter of the alphabet liberally when naming offspring.
______
M45 - the linked-to piece in the post by Ronan Farrow is worth reading in its entirety - unfortunately, it's impossible to opt out completely given, to EE's point, how much he and his control in multiple spheres - Ukranian communications for example.
_____
EE--
So - 'Bust The Trusts!' ???
(that and classify any platform that pushes content at users, algorithmically or otherwise, as a publisher with all the rights and responsibilities that designation entails)
.
I wonder if Potemkin's shenanigans inspired Gogol's Dead Souls, spinning the nothingness of the appearance of wealth and influence into the real thing. One of many cautions not heeded by those who lead us (mostly astray).
Danneau--
Ha!
I would not be surprised to learn that Dead Souls was the name of Mr. M's garage band in college.
Or some such thing.
EE's thorny question of what to do with billion/trillionaires of this world.
Well, looking back over Spanish history .... and the lost Inca Gold...
.... SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY TONS gold - the largest single amount ever collected in one place in history. According to modern estimates, this massive amount of gold is worth more than 30 billion US dollars
... and what happened to the HOLDER of that Inca gold....
Atahuallpa, the 13th and last emperor of the Incas, dies by strangulation at the hands of Francisco Pizarro's Spanish conquistadors.
The Billionaires, just tax them in the same manner most of us are taxed. (on average a person making $83K a year pays $35K a year in taxes) Then use the money for housing, health care, increasing disability payments and child payments. End of problems. Its not like many of them do much for the world, so why do we continue to cater to them, give them tax breaks, allow them to hide money off shore, etc.?
Governments might also start creating and enforcing laws concerning monopolies. Level the playing field.
As to Musk, he does do the strangest things at times. There might be a very good chance his figures are not consistent with the facts. Mind you lots of people do that to inflate their personal "value". Makes them feel better about themselves. Musk's actions do remind me of a child at the lower end of the autism specterm who has not been diagnosed. Act out with out thinking of the repercussions.
There are billionaires who are quite brillant in their fields, but do seem to not have a firm grasp of the real world.
Never saw the point in signing up for twitter and I've had a good life. Some of the "new" methods of communication don't do much beyond spreading hate. there are some benefits, but as we have seen with Goggle cutting Canada off, we leave too much in the hands of corporations. The Canadian government should not spend a second talking to them, simply set up another system. Some bloggers have moved to something referred to as Mastadon or some such thing. The Canadian government has C.B.C., just turn it into a live 24 hr. news station when emergencies occur so all people have to do it tune there or establish an emergency system for information, cut these cheap assholes out of the loop. Not wanting to pay for work done by others, they want it free? sounds a lot like slavery to me.
Post a Comment