Shitty as this behavior may be: Why would there have to be any payment? It's just an account with a private company.
They can setup arbitrary rules or ban you without any rules. It's their service, their database... Just like a club can throw you out on a whim. You may tell your friends and eventually that club may go out of business because of their shitty behavior but that's about it.
This would have been a whole other story if it had happened with the x.com domain name...
That is exactly why. If you need to do something shitty, soften the blow. If you don't, you're an asshole. Making something hurt less means you have empathy. I'm honestly confused why you needed to ask. You're taking something of value from someone and providing nothing in return.
Edit: just because something is allowed (taking the account) doesn't mean it's "good" (in the moral sense). And just because something isn't required (offering compensation) doesn't mean it can't be used as a sign of good will or the lack of it can't be viewed negatively.
And just because something isn't required (offering compensation) doesn't mean it can't be used as a sign of good will or the lack of it can't be viewed negatively.
I agree. The headline could've said "@x user handle grabbed in an asshole move". Expecting payment for something like a Twitter handle is just weird to me.
Twitter handles have exchanged hands in the past for large sums. The precedent exists that handles have monetary value, especially single character ones. It's not much different than selling domain names.
I am rarely a hipster, but I was definitely on the "Musk is an asshole" bandwagon waaaaaaaaaaay back in the days of grabbing credit for PayPal and founding Tesla. He's always been an asshole, but for the longest time his very loud fan club was willing to overlook the various indicators.
They can setup arbitrary rules or ban you without any rules. It’s their service,
Indeed this shows the change in meaning that “service” has undergone in the past 10 or maybe 20 years. Before, the very notion of “service” was that this kind of events could not happen – otherwise it wasn’t a “service”. Reliability and reliance were integral part of the definition of “service”.
Well, back then you paid for service. Then it's a different story, there's an actual contract which is legally binding. Enshittified internet doesn't have those. Nor are users customers but we all know that here.
What if instead of taking over Twitter handle X, he had taken over Twitter handle of say NY Times. Not blocked it or suspended but straight up takeover. They’re part of that company’s brand. X May have not been important monetarily to that person but doing something like this without offering some sort of compensation signals to all other companies who use Twitter that their handle isn’t safe. This may be a unique instance because he wants the X Twitter handle for their rebranding, but it is an asshole move and undoubtedly others will be watching closely.
I agree. They are within their rights to do whatever with their database, their service. But if their decisions impact someone else’s business then they shouldn’t be surprised if someone takes legal action.
Yes they have the right and ability to seize any account on their service for any reason. But if they want to be a stable platform where people build their brands and their businesses, there should be an expectation that this would not happen. Due process for when there is a dispute.
Clearly musk wants people to view the platform as such a place so this is a dumb move. In addition to being asshole
if they want to be a stable platform where people build their brands and their businesses
See, I don’t think that’s the goal anymore. I think the goal now is to repackage Xitter into something that looks new and different with all the right buzz words about AI. And then he desperately offloads as much of his position as possible on some other sap.
Musk took the handle as part of his monetization "strategy" to rebrand so with money involved payment for taking something from a user is a logical step.
Not taking it would be the most logical step, but exchange of money to compensate would be a close second.
Elon Musk has taken over the @x Twitter account without paying its owner as part of the social network’s ongoing rebrand.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but a "rebrand" should not be "ongoing" for any reason. That's like saying your surgery is ongoing. That's bad, mmmkay.
Not to mention, so I can stop seeing pictures of him, pressing his fingertips together in front of his face like he’s some fucking pensive genius. I’m goddamn tired of it
The vast majority of these users aren’t paying for subscription, and many advertisers have dropped it. Meanwhile it needs to pay additional debt and interest from the acquisition itself.
It is on its death bed already. All it takes is for the owner to realize it’s not worth taking losses over it anymore.
All these people are terminally attached to the people they are connected to on the platform. Moving over is easy. Convincing your friends to move along with you is hard. As a creator, convincing your whole follower base to move along with you is nearly impossible.
No offense but this is so goddamn stupid. We don’t live in a bubble and unfortunately their actions may have an impact as they ripple through the business and political world.
Intentionally censoring news because “lol get wrecked Jeff Bezos” is hurting no one but yourself.
You’ve got to assume that Twitter can revoke any users access at any time for any reason under its existing terms and conditions. This is a predictable douche move by Musk but the original account holder very likely has zero recourse.
The article quotes the TOS that gives only one reason why a person might lose their twiX handle, and it’s not “Elon Musk wants it”, so there’s probably going to be a line of lawyers wanting to take this case.
They should have at least offered to give him the twitter handle. haha
TOS aren’t legally bindingTOS aren’t always legally binding, and they’re a private company, appropriating an account stored on their private servers for their own service only. There’s no legal standing There’s probably no legal standing to do anything about this. It’s just shitty and immature, not illegal.
(Technically, the TOS even says they can take accounts for trademark violations, and since Meta owns the trademark on the use of ‘X’, clearly they’re just taking it so they can give it to Meta and help them enforce their trademark.)
Source on them not being legally binding? They have a mixed track record but I’ve never seen anyone flat out say they aren’t legally binding. Sometimes they are; sometimes they are not.
I am no lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that something pre-dating the trademark is grandfathered in. Hence why Steam uses steampowered.com and not steam.com
Utility bills aren't binding because they're subsidized. They're binding because they are contracts, and contract law is a thing that exists.
It's a complicated thing and there are many restrictions and conditions on what makes a valid contract and what kinds of things are and aren't allowed. Many Terms of Service violate contract law and thus wind up not being enforceable, but it is absolutely not correct to say that Terms of Service are in general not binding.
Looks like they’re binding if they follow very specific criteria; I don’t know if TwitterX’s qualify, but I’ll accept that my above statement is probably wrong.
That said, they do have a carveout for trademark violations which technically this is, because X is trademarked, just not by Twitter.
It’s also specifically about a trade. If I had a vitamin company called X and a vacuum cleaner company called steam, neither of those companies could legally have anything to say about it.
He thinks that lawsuits are great publicity. Plus he apparently has some sort of psychological defiance disorder, so he would love to say “oh yeah? Make me!”
Microsoft and Meta both own trademarks on the letter X. Trademarks are always context-sensitive, meaning multiple entities can trademark the same sequence of letters in different contexts.
TOS aren’t legally binding only when they are not compliant with existing laws! For example when a hotel says in it’s TOS “we can murder you in your sleep” that is not binding, but when they say “we can expell you for wearing a pink polo shirt” that is legally binding
I had a landlord who had a really hard time understanding that state law specified what was legal for them to put in a rental contract, and that if someone signed a contract with illegal provisions, they were not bound to follow it.
Your first sentence is so unbelievably and obviously wrong that you there’s no way we should trust any of your other thoughts on the matter. You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about.
You know, everyone should start calling the service twiX, just to irritate the candy bar company, which is actually a multi-billion dollar conglomerate that does care how its brands are perceived.
But, as I mentioned above, Twix the candy bar and TwiX the portmanteau for Twitter/X exist in different product spaces. Consumers are unlikely to be confused between the two. I still wouldn’t mind it catching on, haha.
I used to like Twix bars until I saw the kind of shit they are saying on their online platform. They are kinda all over the place, but I think it’s because the people at Twix know their racism is bad for business so try to hide it a little.
They don’t even allow me to delete my account. They suspended me (never posted anything) and now I’d need to beg to be unbanned, just to get off Mr. Elons wild ride. I’m in the EU so I’m thinking about making use of my right to be forgotten.
Which makes his desire to have x be the everything app so much more horrifying. That level of consolidated power is horrifying on its own, and it’s even more horrifying knowing the person running it enjoys abusing his power.
Whether or not they can sue, I think the point is everyone knows that one could sell a one letter Twitter account for tens of thousands (or, could have 2 years ago, anyway). So, just that Musk is a gigantic dickhead.
Not to downplay the quality of the movies, but one is a biopic and one is a toy adaptation; one could easily throw in “finally an original movie that’s not a superhero, sequel, biopic, or toy adaptation.” They’re good movies. Good movies can come in any form, superheroes, sequels, and remakes included.
Not hard at all. I can already tell you I liked Everything Everywhere All at Once (this year’s BP winner) way more than Dances with Wolves.
1991 is a uniquely weak year for the Academy though. You might have had a stronger argument with 1994 or 1995, but I can still think of plenty of movies released in the last decade that I would rank up there with Schindler's List or Pulp Fiction.
I think what people are asking for right now is for studios to take risks and be creative. They want to experience something different. Superheroes and remakes have been done to death to the point that some (myself included) are just saturated.
2 wrongs don’t make a right. This will only end up with more duds scattered across the land.
They’re free to use them but they’ll have to clean up quickly and efficiently, and even then I think there will still be the odd dud. I’m sure civilians will be thankful that there’s an eye for an eye.
Actually it’s technically a part of Russia now. Hope they still help clean up in the case they lose the war. Though it is also the choice of the USA/NATO who provided those munitions in the first place. They’ll definitely also help clean up, right guys?
I’ve searched through a few of the countries that didn’t sign the convention and they either manufacture or have bought large stocks of cluster bombs (India, Argentina, US, and Brazil). The trend seems self evident.
I still don’t get why we are trying to justify unloading our backlog of dangerous cluster bombs onto Ukraine soil. Blood is on the hands of the lobbyists that wanted to clear out the warehouses full of cluster bombs. We can make more munitions that we have been sending, which will be less of a hazard to Ukrainian farmers.
Of the many reasons, one is that they are highly effective at killing entreched infantry, which is the majority of the entire frontline. Artillary rounds that explode on impact or fragment in the air are safer for whoever inherits the land, but it take many more times the amount of those rounds to accomplish the same saturation as cluster munitions. This is a sad fact.
You’re right though, if Russian farmers get the land they will be bothered by both sides cluster bomblets, probably killed. Ukrainian farmers might be happy to have the land at all.
Ukrainian farmers will be happy to have land that will kill them? This self gas lighting is insane. How about taking off a billion off the lend lease debt everytime a Ukranian dies from unexploded cluster bombs then?
I’m not sure I have an opinion on affirmative action generally, but it strikes me that it will be difficult if not impossible for the two camps to find middle ground on the issue - because ensuring equality of treatment and equity of outcomes are probably mutually exclusive.
Said differently, I can see how you can either truly treat everyone the same, or try to make sure everyone has equality of opportunity/outcome, and to be sure both are individually a reasonable goal on paper.
The problem is, they can’t both be true. Either everyone has the same treatment, which doesn’t solve the problem of some people starting the race far behind the starting line; or the system tries to compensate for disadvantages, which inherently means that not all participants are afforded the same treatment.
That is quite patronizing towards those students. Basically saying that they aren’t as smart as white people. Oh how all this woke crap comes full circle
The fact that they chose to report those claims in itself is part of their bias. Those kind of stories will always pop up if you give certain people platforms. Factual journalism would have required investigating the credibility of the claims before broadcasting them to the world.
No, it wouldn’t. Journalists report on the content of upcoming lawsuits all the time. It’s up for the law courts to decided the validity of legal claims being made, not the media.
There are millions lawsuits in the US being filed every year. A certain number are absolute nonsense. Filing a lawsuit does not mean jack in and of itself and as such should not be reported on unless elements of credibility can at the very least be ascertained.
The courts will decide based on their own data and laws, but that does not mean journalists should not verify if the information they are broadcasting has at the very least a shred of credibility. Else you are just picking and choosing propaganda to broadcast.
Why do you believe it’s factual simply from reading the complaint? The Daily Telegraph does no follow-ups, interviews, or fact-checking (what we in the business might call “journalism”). It simply reports on the complaint and cowardly allows you to draw your own conclusions.
So we must ask: why did a right-wing propaganda outlet report this so uncritically? They have a well-established lack of interest in journalism. So what purpose was served by publishing this article and in this way?
This is why I posted it’s a bad source, and this is the problem with bad sources. Even the “factual” articles they publish are purposefully misleading at best… and total misrepresentations at worst.
It’s factual because it accurately reported the claims made in the lawsuit. Journalists do this all the time.
Obviously the Telegraph chose to publish this story because it appeals to the political leanings of their readership, but virtually all newspapers do that to a certain degree.
It seems you have fallen into the trap of automatically dismissing the source/article as “propaganda” because its political viewpoint differs from your own.
No, bad sources do this all the time. Actual journalists from good sources do things like:
Interview people!
Check sources and their reputability!
Discover facts!
Has any of that been done here? Why do you suppose not?
Obviously the Telegraph chose to publish this story because it appeals to the political leanings of their readership, but virtually all newspapers do that to a certain degree.
Because some sources are biased, we must accept a source as massively and obviously biased as the Daily Telegraph? Take your flimsy equivocation fallacies elsewhere. We can draw a line, and that line should certainly exclude places as bad as the Daily Telegraph.
It seems you have fallen into the trap of automatically dismissing the source/article as “propaganda” because its political viewpoint differs from your own.
No… I’m dismissing it because the Daily Telegraph is a bad source and it only publishes articles to serve its own purposes, which have nothing to do with truth or facts. Its political leanings are obviously horrible and idiotic but have nothing to do with the simple fact that they are a bad source.
If you think journalists routinely delve into extensive, detailed investigations based off a simple press release then I would say you’ve been watching too many movies.
I somehow doubt that you hold media sources that align with your own political persuasions to such exacting scrutiny.
Did I say anything about an extensive, detailed investigation? Does it appear they did literally any work, even up to and including picking up the nearest telephone and calling… well, basically anyone?
(Here’s a secret, me to you; I bet they did do that and they didn’t like what they uncovered. It’s okay though, they decided not to publish it.)
Not sure what sources I consume have anything to do with the quality of the Daily Telegraph. If I got my daily news from Sesame Street, would that suddenly make the Daily Telegraph an acceptable source?
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