Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week, both our winners on the insightful side are invocations of established maxims. In first place it’s an anonymous comment about people flipping opinion of hacked materials between Hunter Biden and JD Vance:

How many times must I tap the sign?

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

“There must be in-groups whom the law protectes [sic] but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

–Frank Wilhoit

In second place, it’s Stephen T. Stone regarding the latest ignorant and confused attack on Section 230:

And here we have another example of one of the most truthful maxims ever uttered on Techdirt: No one can oppose Section 230 without lying about it.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment form Reasonable Coward about Elon Musk’s hypocrisy and general personality:

Birds of a feather

Musk and Trump have similar personalities. They say whatever sounds great in the moment, and don’t let it constrain their actions in the slightest. They see no shame in hypocrisy, because they’re incapable of shame.

Elon might have well said, “Twitter is broken, and only I can fix it!”

Next, it’s an anonymous comment based on reading ExTwitter’s first transparency report:

Page 8 of that report is fascinating

If I’m reading it correctly (and I may not be, as it’s poorly/vaguely worded) Twitter is still massively overrun with bot-generated spam. This is consistent with Twitter’s history pre-takeover: they couldn’t control it then either. It’s also consistent with observations elsewhere: darknet marketplaces are brimming with offers to sell batches of social media accounts along with the automation to orchestrate their actions. AND it’s consistent with what we know about bot operations run by governments (e.g. Internet Research Agency in Russia).

This is only going to get worse as LLMs are deployed to create content that’s progressively more difficult to discern from human-generated content, and as botnet operators do what they’ve done for 20+ years: upgrade their C&C and find ever-more-ingenious ways to conceal themselves.

Over on the funny side, both our winners come in response to our post about that transparency report. In first place, it’s an anonymous comment about the frequent, robust transparency reports that the old Twitter used to release:

Since then, theses reports have been so transparent they become invisible.

In second place, it’s another anonymous comment about the details of the report:

From this transparency report, they’ve suspended 464M accounts because of spam & “manipulation” just for the first six months of 2024! (they don’t say how much have been re-instated.)
That’s about 150% of the number of users of Twitter in 2022.
I now understand why Elon has so much difficulties to estimate the correct number of users, more than half are spam!

For editor’s choice on the funny side, it’s JMT responding to a bizarre comment claiming we made up the transparency report:

Yes, the report that exTwitter released to the public, which Mike read and then wrote an opinion piece on, is totally made up. The document that downloaded to my computer when I clicked the link in the post is actually just a figment of Mike’s imagination. And mine apparently…

Finally, we have a comment from BernardoVera rebutting accusations that Musk isn’t really a free speech absolutist:

Nah… Musk absolutely believes in his own right to speak absolutely freely — whenever, wherever, and however he wishes.

That’s all for this week, folks!