434
Elon Musk is considering taking Twitter out of Europe amid EU compliance investigation
(www.businessinsider.com)
Fucking good
this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
434 points (93.9% liked)
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Props to the Commission to get Musk to take out his own trash
Free speech platform for the whole world
Neither of those will be true in the end
Well, the "speech platform" part is sort of true. The "free" part isn't, the "for the world" part certainly isn't. the "whole world" part is only true if you correct the "for" to "against".
Suppose this happens - his stated dream of global town square dead - except it was already because most people in the world live neither in Europe nor US. China has wechat behind their great firewall, russophone areas have vkontact and telegram and their alternate reality, meanwhile, in much of the rest of the world I fear Meta dominates (even in francophone Europe, and Africa so I'm told).
So - forcing europeans to rethink could give the fediverse an opportunity - but it also hasn't penetrated much globally, the real challenge is to broaden beyond english speakers and north-atlantic. How to do this? One issue is fediverse is best on desktop, while most people in developing countries are using small screens. But it's not just about tech - there are big japanese fedi-communities with little interaction with the west, presumably due to language barrier.
A decentralised system could even thrive in authoritarian states, if there is some way to protect server admins. I recall twitter seemed to play a key role during the Arab spring, what's the replacement ?
To go a bit further, if you like conspiracies, maybe this was the whole point - instructions from the Kremlin, and big cash from Saudis inter alia...- to break the concept of shared global discussion, noting twitter also played a key role in western support for Ukraine too. They are late - that ship sailed, but we don't yet have another, be careful what you wish for.
Oh just f*** off so.
Take it out of the US too.
Piss off musk.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In recent weeks Elon Musk has suggested Twitter could stop being accessible in Europe in order to avoid new regulation enacted by the European Commission.
The Tesla billionaire, who acquired Twitter, now called X, a year ago for $44 billion, has discussed simply removing the app's availability in the region, or blocking users in the European Union from accessing it, the person said.
"That's part of the reason he gutted international teams the first chance he got," one of the people familiar said, referring to some of the thousands of employees Musk has laid off or fired since taking over the company.
A winnowing down of Twitter's international presence came up again earlier this year, when Musk decided to close nearly all of the company's roughly two dozen global offices, including most in Europe and India, as well as those in Australia, Africa, and South Korea.
Although Musk has yet to pull X out of any country, essentially no employees remain in Europe, one of the people said, as offices in Paris, Madrid, and Berlin are closed.
Although Musk has met at least twice this year with Commissioner Breton about what X needs to do to comply with the DSA, he's lost patience with the situation, one of the people familiar said.
The original article contains 752 words, the summary contains 212 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
What the fuck is Twitter?
X was formerly called so (/s)
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Just shut it down everywhere. Sunk cost.
Why stop there, he should take it out of the US too