It's not like Twitter wasn't being paid for all that. (I don't know about your hypothesized foreign and state and local governments, but we already have millions of dollars in receipts from the FBI. I strongly suspect there are other black-budget type revenue streams that we will never see receipts for.)
Can Twitter say no to all that government cheese and still hope to turn a profit?
I can't begin to prove this, but I would bet profitability becomes much easier if Twitter is run as a business instead of an arm of government. The number of time-consuming stupid games plummets, and the much smaller workforce can pivot to basic functions.
Twitter's annual report for 2021 said "As of December 31, 2021, we employed over 7,500 full-time employees." I don't know where the 8 thousand figure is from, but counting part-timers, it's at least close.
I heard this number from Elon during a recent spaces call. He was reviewing his efforts in the first weeks of ownership to cut costs and overhead to avoid bankruptcy! An employee was also complaining that the free food in the employee lounges had gone down!
There were clearly quite a few staffers at Twitter whose job was to handle government relations, of all kinds--and perhaps primarily censorship requests.
There were clearly quite a few who were embedded assets, most likely still drawing a federal paycheck. I'd be more than a little surprised if some of those aren't still there.
Like Steve Bannon said, Musk was buying a crime scene. Everything you write about is either illegal or unethical, as it all pertains to violating someone's free speech. The government is doing it through a private firm instead of directly themselves. Quintessential facism, as the government controls the private sector and they do what the government tells them to do. I haven't seen all the threads but in the ones I've read there's no push back from anyone at Twitter.
It is not only social media. When the “limited” government is so big, with so many employees who self-righteously believe, that they are empowered to dictate to others in the name of fairness or equity or whatever, citizens are no longer free. Many industries and businesses have to obtain “approvals” from one or more governments to do anything - to sell a new product, offer a discount, etc. The government often oversteps its role and competence. Nor does the government consider itself bound by the law. It’s interference in social media is one glaring example of a much larger infringement on our freedom.
Excellent insight! The volume of requests to “moderate” content is overwhelming. It is simpler and even more efficient to just go along. Especially if the requests lineup with your own political beliefs.
That’s exactly right. Even if political beliefs didn’t align, which they clearly do, it is easier to take the path of least resistance when dealing with a government that has the power to put you out of business or prosecute your executives.
thre free market is a myth. The feds pick and choose winners, via legislative fiat or budget decisions. They cab destroy an industry, or create a new one with the stroke of a pen, or by adding some pork to an omnibus bill. Locally, zoning boards, licensing agencies and building inspectors can kill or fast track any project based on a whim, or a bag of cash. The entire sysrem is corrupt, from the federal govt. to the local fire inspector. There is no free market, just a giant regulatory scheme made to empower and enrich politicians and beuracrats.
I can only imagine what the 1) George Floyd, 2) J6 and 3) Inflation Twitter files look like . . . If this wasn't the government, I'd say it seems like organized crime. Since these are government actors, I'll refer to them as the disorganized crime syndicate.
I burst out laughing when I came to “Before you cook that cheeseburger for order number seven" - Twitter never produced anything. It was supposed to be a platform for OTHER PEOPLE to provide content. All they had to do was make the system functional.
But in the way that our bureaucracy takes on every aspect of our lives instead of actually being helpful, Twitter got way too big for its britches. The employees no doubt felt a sense of self-importance the equivalent of organizing a D-Day invasion. What a shit show.
The cheeseburger they had to cook was a platform for more or less open discussion, and they never managed it. They banned Covid skepticism but allowed child sexual abuse material. An interesting window into the priorities of the governmental clients!
Let's not forget that both the FBI and the CIA have decades of experience in whipping up patsies to take the blame for their own misdeeds (disdeeds? maldeeds? damn all these conjured up words!). So far, it's only staff at Twitter who've lost their jobs that has resembled any type of "punishment." Only the employees were merely patsies in this crime. Yes, they made wrong choices, but the real criminals were those directing them. When the actual "whippers" pay dearly for treason AND our government gets resoundingly reigned in for violating the First Amendment so blatantly, I'll celebrate. Ten spread out Twitter File rollouts later, and it's crystal clear what was happening. Each one is supposed to be more damning, yet mainstream media yawns and most people still are cluelessly intact in their bubbles. Musk should just dump it all and let's get to fighting back seriously.
The Deep State is paying, but they aren't paying anywhere near the costs they impose. I don't know why the pre-Elon shareholders put up with all those years without profitability.
I completely agree with this. We're finding more of it all the time -- the blending of state and corporate functions has become incredibly serious. And the use of government money is becoming an important piece of the corporate business model.
The Fed may not be cutting a check for every "service rendered."
But they may be providing the infrastructure--everything from "cloud storage" (that is, massive data centers) to connectivity bandwidth and time, software, integration services, etc, etc, etc.
Sort of like a restaurant with a silent "benefactor" providing the land, the building, the meat, the veggies, the equipment, and all the "overt owner" of the restaurant has to do is provide some labor and public relations. The overt owner can pretend it's his business and babble about profit/loss, marketing, etc, etc. But the benefactor calls the shots, and the overt owner dances to his tune--opening and closing when told, changing the menu as told, hiring and firing, etc. etc.
That's very likely what's going on. "In-kind" capital investments provided, on top of, and in addition to, cash payments for services rendered.
Exactly. This is CTHs take on it. Jacks Magic Coffee Shop, to use his phrasing. Twitter and Google and Amazon were all funded and developed w CIA money. Big Tech pretends to be a business but their real ownership is the National Security State.
We have separation of church and state for a reason. Now we need separation of state and information platforms.
You make a good point in this: "the Twitter files are about the way government without boundaries consumes resources from every entity it touches." But then there's this: "Twitter’s path to bankruptcy runs through the premise that every government official who doesn’t like a tweet deserves a meeting." That idea of "deserving" a meeting. That was ultimately Twitter's choice. Rather than telling all these various government "officials" to go pound sand, they invited increasingly more interference, reveled in it even.
And I know what you'll say: they had little choice. But they did. This situation very heavily lists to the left. All they really had to do was publicly expose the censorship on the left to the right and they would have been left alone in the ensuing battle. (Besides censorship *at the moment* is primarily a Democrat thing, not really a specifically liberal thing or a conservative thing or a Republican thing, but a Democrat thing, so they would have had large portions of the population backing them.)
I very much think they had a choice, but they weren't ideologically able to see it. The prior management also somehow doesn't seem to have noticed that they weren't making money, as if that was never the point. Very strange times for big corporate business. Compare Twitter's response to government to the way Canadian banks responded to their government's demand to freeze Freedom Convoy bank accounts. Total capture, a blending of state and corporate interests -- as if there's no line between the public and private sectors.
"Total capture, a blending of state and corporate interests -- as if there's no line between the public and private sectors." In a word, fascism (real fascism, not "you want people to be able to say mean things" fascism.)
I don't know where I read it, but I saw someone speculate that Twitter (and its compatriots) were from the beginning supported by the security state as a tool of manipulation. That's why they never cared about making money. The point was never to be a "business." Being a business was only cover for an intricate and all-encompassing psy-op. I'd say they're crazy, but . . .
Way too late for that. The Bill of Rights haven't truly existed for decades now. It's gangster government from DC. We need a whole new system as the gangsters will never go quietly.
"In addition to the free speech problem and the pathologies of gleichschaltung, the Twitter files are about the way government without boundaries consumes resources from every entity it touches."
To me, this is the overarching point. This goes well beyond twitter. The government has so much unaccountable power that it can choose to bankrupt almost anybody it wants. Fighting the government is hideously expensive (lawyers at $450/hr minimum, etc).
Meanwhile uk users are DEMANDING to see the UK twitter files....lol....but seriously, if folks are trying to blame Musk for driving the company into bankruptcy, well the twitter files exposed the true culprits didn't they?
Musk has been suspiciously silent on how exactly the new Twitter is handling all these government requests. I somehow doubt they started showing them the middle finger with Musk's arrival.
It makes sense now why elon fired so many people and everyone said Twitter would be flooded with hate and fail etc etc. Twitter was(is) a Govt spy app. I figure that’s why the child sex stuff was allowed to remain….either the accounts are Fbi traps or they are forever “monitoring” them.
And TikTok is a Chinese spy app, FB keeps track of family/friend groups, Google’s ND monitors neighborhoods, and so on. All under the guise of providing socialization services for us.
Hey Chris. I’ve been thinking the same thing. And this wasn’t just a private enterprise. It was a publicly traded company, owned by shareholders, with an independent board of directors (theoretically). They have a duty to run the company for the benefit of shareholders, not to one customer’s political agenda. I suppose they might argue that serving the US government was the key to their business model, in general, but they obviously wouldn’t do that.
Ideology trumps common [and business] sense every time...
When you're dealing with the WORLD'S BIGGEST EMPLOYER [the United States government] which has (seemingly) infinite resources and no accountability, it's no wonder the bleeding heart commies that used to run Twitter were loosing $4 Million (+) per day. Turns out Censorship and Wokeism are EXPENSIVE... but to the purple haired ideologues that were "Twitter" , the cost of DESTROYING our American Republic was worth every penny.
Or, to strip the discussion down: It looks like Elon Musk bought a quasi-governmental agency, and he's trying to turn it into a business.
It's not like Twitter wasn't being paid for all that. (I don't know about your hypothesized foreign and state and local governments, but we already have millions of dollars in receipts from the FBI. I strongly suspect there are other black-budget type revenue streams that we will never see receipts for.)
Can Twitter say no to all that government cheese and still hope to turn a profit?
I can't begin to prove this, but I would bet profitability becomes much easier if Twitter is run as a business instead of an arm of government. The number of time-consuming stupid games plummets, and the much smaller workforce can pivot to basic functions.
Plus he took # of employees from 8,000 to 2,000 which reduced the cash burn.
Twitter's annual report for 2021 said "As of December 31, 2021, we employed over 7,500 full-time employees." I don't know where the 8 thousand figure is from, but counting part-timers, it's at least close.
I heard this number from Elon during a recent spaces call. He was reviewing his efforts in the first weeks of ownership to cut costs and overhead to avoid bankruptcy! An employee was also complaining that the free food in the employee lounges had gone down!
I think you are right. Elon spoke about how he was changing the way advertising works to show advertisers an ROI for what they spend.
There were clearly quite a few staffers at Twitter whose job was to handle government relations, of all kinds--and perhaps primarily censorship requests.
There were clearly quite a few who were embedded assets, most likely still drawing a federal paycheck. I'd be more than a little surprised if some of those aren't still there.
After digging around a bit, I'd agree.. but I'd have to put more emphasis on the "looks like".
https://vashiva.com/dr-shiva-live-elon-musk-agent-for-government-censorship-the-proof/
A side of the story that hadn't occurred to me. Good point! Something about the votes in 2016 really broke those people, didn't it?
Like Steve Bannon said, Musk was buying a crime scene. Everything you write about is either illegal or unethical, as it all pertains to violating someone's free speech. The government is doing it through a private firm instead of directly themselves. Quintessential facism, as the government controls the private sector and they do what the government tells them to do. I haven't seen all the threads but in the ones I've read there's no push back from anyone at Twitter.
Danny Huckabee
It is not only social media. When the “limited” government is so big, with so many employees who self-righteously believe, that they are empowered to dictate to others in the name of fairness or equity or whatever, citizens are no longer free. Many industries and businesses have to obtain “approvals” from one or more governments to do anything - to sell a new product, offer a discount, etc. The government often oversteps its role and competence. Nor does the government consider itself bound by the law. It’s interference in social media is one glaring example of a much larger infringement on our freedom.
Excellent insight! The volume of requests to “moderate” content is overwhelming. It is simpler and even more efficient to just go along. Especially if the requests lineup with your own political beliefs.
That’s exactly right. Even if political beliefs didn’t align, which they clearly do, it is easier to take the path of least resistance when dealing with a government that has the power to put you out of business or prosecute your executives.
thre free market is a myth. The feds pick and choose winners, via legislative fiat or budget decisions. They cab destroy an industry, or create a new one with the stroke of a pen, or by adding some pork to an omnibus bill. Locally, zoning boards, licensing agencies and building inspectors can kill or fast track any project based on a whim, or a bag of cash. The entire sysrem is corrupt, from the federal govt. to the local fire inspector. There is no free market, just a giant regulatory scheme made to empower and enrich politicians and beuracrats.
It’s not just the feds. It’s state and local governments, too. Even in red states, but more wholeheartedly in blue states.
This is what the Snowden revelations showed us -- for Google, and 'social media' in general, the government is the customer. Surveillance is what they buy. And they had 52.6 billion dollars in their off-the-books black budget as revealed in 2013. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/black-budget-leaked-by-edward-snowden-describes-nsa-team-that-hacks-foreign-targets/2013/08/30/8b7e684c-119b-11e3-bdf6-e4fc677d94a1_story.html
I can only imagine what the 1) George Floyd, 2) J6 and 3) Inflation Twitter files look like . . . If this wasn't the government, I'd say it seems like organized crime. Since these are government actors, I'll refer to them as the disorganized crime syndicate.
Kevin, DC *is* organized crime and has been for...geez...FDR? Wilson? 1866?
I burst out laughing when I came to “Before you cook that cheeseburger for order number seven" - Twitter never produced anything. It was supposed to be a platform for OTHER PEOPLE to provide content. All they had to do was make the system functional.
But in the way that our bureaucracy takes on every aspect of our lives instead of actually being helpful, Twitter got way too big for its britches. The employees no doubt felt a sense of self-importance the equivalent of organizing a D-Day invasion. What a shit show.
The cheeseburger they had to cook was a platform for more or less open discussion, and they never managed it. They banned Covid skepticism but allowed child sexual abuse material. An interesting window into the priorities of the governmental clients!
Let's not forget that both the FBI and the CIA have decades of experience in whipping up patsies to take the blame for their own misdeeds (disdeeds? maldeeds? damn all these conjured up words!). So far, it's only staff at Twitter who've lost their jobs that has resembled any type of "punishment." Only the employees were merely patsies in this crime. Yes, they made wrong choices, but the real criminals were those directing them. When the actual "whippers" pay dearly for treason AND our government gets resoundingly reigned in for violating the First Amendment so blatantly, I'll celebrate. Ten spread out Twitter File rollouts later, and it's crystal clear what was happening. Each one is supposed to be more damning, yet mainstream media yawns and most people still are cluelessly intact in their bubbles. Musk should just dump it all and let's get to fighting back seriously.
Hey, come on, building and running all that software does take some amount of effort.
Nothing like the amount of "investor" money that they've burned through, but still.
Well, yes, but....
The squeak that greases the wheel gets the attention.
What if Twitter is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Deep State?
What if the Deep State (the Feds) are paying for (either with cash or in-kind) attention to their issues?
Then the Deep State is the client.
And all those meetings that are seemingly disruptive to "the business", actually ARE "the business."
I've been wondering about this for a while, and was surprised that Elon Musk was allowed to take control for that very reason:
https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/elon-musk-flies-into-a-stellar-wind
The Deep State is paying, but they aren't paying anywhere near the costs they impose. I don't know why the pre-Elon shareholders put up with all those years without profitability.
Um. That's sort of the thing about "the Deep State". It's not all located in government. Not by a long shot.
Organized finance has always been its own form of governance.
I completely agree with this. We're finding more of it all the time -- the blending of state and corporate functions has become incredibly serious. And the use of government money is becoming an important piece of the corporate business model.
That's the point of "in-kind payment."
The Fed may not be cutting a check for every "service rendered."
But they may be providing the infrastructure--everything from "cloud storage" (that is, massive data centers) to connectivity bandwidth and time, software, integration services, etc, etc, etc.
Sort of like a restaurant with a silent "benefactor" providing the land, the building, the meat, the veggies, the equipment, and all the "overt owner" of the restaurant has to do is provide some labor and public relations. The overt owner can pretend it's his business and babble about profit/loss, marketing, etc, etc. But the benefactor calls the shots, and the overt owner dances to his tune--opening and closing when told, changing the menu as told, hiring and firing, etc. etc.
That's very likely what's going on. "In-kind" capital investments provided, on top of, and in addition to, cash payments for services rendered.
Good analogy!
What did the Board of Directors know, and when did they know it? They have a duty to shareholders.
At Kent
Exactly. This is CTHs take on it. Jacks Magic Coffee Shop, to use his phrasing. Twitter and Google and Amazon were all funded and developed w CIA money. Big Tech pretends to be a business but their real ownership is the National Security State.
We have separation of church and state for a reason. Now we need separation of state and information platforms.
You make a good point in this: "the Twitter files are about the way government without boundaries consumes resources from every entity it touches." But then there's this: "Twitter’s path to bankruptcy runs through the premise that every government official who doesn’t like a tweet deserves a meeting." That idea of "deserving" a meeting. That was ultimately Twitter's choice. Rather than telling all these various government "officials" to go pound sand, they invited increasingly more interference, reveled in it even.
And I know what you'll say: they had little choice. But they did. This situation very heavily lists to the left. All they really had to do was publicly expose the censorship on the left to the right and they would have been left alone in the ensuing battle. (Besides censorship *at the moment* is primarily a Democrat thing, not really a specifically liberal thing or a conservative thing or a Republican thing, but a Democrat thing, so they would have had large portions of the population backing them.)
I very much think they had a choice, but they weren't ideologically able to see it. The prior management also somehow doesn't seem to have noticed that they weren't making money, as if that was never the point. Very strange times for big corporate business. Compare Twitter's response to government to the way Canadian banks responded to their government's demand to freeze Freedom Convoy bank accounts. Total capture, a blending of state and corporate interests -- as if there's no line between the public and private sectors.
"Total capture, a blending of state and corporate interests -- as if there's no line between the public and private sectors." In a word, fascism (real fascism, not "you want people to be able to say mean things" fascism.)
I don't know where I read it, but I saw someone speculate that Twitter (and its compatriots) were from the beginning supported by the security state as a tool of manipulation. That's why they never cared about making money. The point was never to be a "business." Being a business was only cover for an intricate and all-encompassing psy-op. I'd say they're crazy, but . . .
We 'conspiracy theorists' have been suggesting that for years!
@Lillia
Way too late for that. The Bill of Rights haven't truly existed for decades now. It's gangster government from DC. We need a whole new system as the gangsters will never go quietly.
"The gangsters will never go quietly." That's the thought that should really make a person sick to their stomachs.
"In addition to the free speech problem and the pathologies of gleichschaltung, the Twitter files are about the way government without boundaries consumes resources from every entity it touches."
To me, this is the overarching point. This goes well beyond twitter. The government has so much unaccountable power that it can choose to bankrupt almost anybody it wants. Fighting the government is hideously expensive (lawyers at $450/hr minimum, etc).
Meanwhile uk users are DEMANDING to see the UK twitter files....lol....but seriously, if folks are trying to blame Musk for driving the company into bankruptcy, well the twitter files exposed the true culprits didn't they?
Musk has been suspiciously silent on how exactly the new Twitter is handling all these government requests. I somehow doubt they started showing them the middle finger with Musk's arrival.
I've asked this question, several times, without a response. We'll see if he ever addresses it.
Don't hold your breath!
Much more on that line of thinking here:
https://vashiva.com/dr-shiva-live-elon-musk-agent-for-government-censorship-the-proof/
Good thoughts. A prime example of how governments are essentially parasites.
It makes sense now why elon fired so many people and everyone said Twitter would be flooded with hate and fail etc etc. Twitter was(is) a Govt spy app. I figure that’s why the child sex stuff was allowed to remain….either the accounts are Fbi traps or they are forever “monitoring” them.
And TikTok is a Chinese spy app, FB keeps track of family/friend groups, Google’s ND monitors neighborhoods, and so on. All under the guise of providing socialization services for us.
Hey Chris. I’ve been thinking the same thing. And this wasn’t just a private enterprise. It was a publicly traded company, owned by shareholders, with an independent board of directors (theoretically). They have a duty to run the company for the benefit of shareholders, not to one customer’s political agenda. I suppose they might argue that serving the US government was the key to their business model, in general, but they obviously wouldn’t do that.
Ideology trumps common [and business] sense every time...
When you're dealing with the WORLD'S BIGGEST EMPLOYER [the United States government] which has (seemingly) infinite resources and no accountability, it's no wonder the bleeding heart commies that used to run Twitter were loosing $4 Million (+) per day. Turns out Censorship and Wokeism are EXPENSIVE... but to the purple haired ideologues that were "Twitter" , the cost of DESTROYING our American Republic was worth every penny.
"Loosing" $4 million? Surely you know the difference between "loosing" and "losing"?