@woozle @Gargron I'm assuming it's the rating journalists thing?

@abbenm @woozle @Gargron Worse (however that was possible): https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1000560049389907969

@hay @abbenm @woozle @Gargron fair warning, the replies under that tweet can give you an aneurysm

@abbenm @Gargron

If that's it -- which I presume is this: https://www.vox.com/2018/5/24/17389388/elon-musk-twitter-pravda -- then it sounds like he may be taking a backwards step in the right direction.

...which is to say, YES to crowdsourced epistemics, but it absolutely MUST have some way to track the reputation of the people doing the rating, so it doesn't get brigaded by organized extremists or whatever... and I bet it doesn't.

The inevitable results will then taint the idea for years.

>.<

@woozle looks like I was wrong and it was instead a tweet ominously suggesting some group controls the media

@abbenm This is news to most people?

(I mean... I suppose it's a slight stretch to think of the 0.001% as a "group", but they seem to operate as if they were, 99.999% of the time.)

@woozle

@abbenm

It is probably the direction where this sort of critisism is coming from thats news worthy, elon maybe the hero of so many nerds, but he is just as much a made man who is part of the establishment. His collaborations with the biggest car manufacturers in the world show this. He is a prime example for someone who just had an upward trajectory this whole time... from online banking to space exploration in a heartbeat, seamingly.

@woozle @abbenm
While an internet startup is not seen as something prestigous, a car company still has this sort of positive stigma to it because all the car companies we know played a HUGE part in our collective history, just as elon musk is about to to the same for us all.

@woozle @abbenm The problem is... don't actually look at the replies because they're awful, but, well, the replies.

There's an anti-semitic meme that's existed since before the rise of the original Nazis, claiming that Jews control the press for their own benefit.

Whether he meant to or not, Musk just blew the dogwhistle on that meme *extremely* hard, and a lot of Nazis heard it... and, well, he should've known better than to blow that dogwhistle.

@woozle @abbenm The problem with dogwhistling, of course, is that it has a degree of plausible deniability - one can't say that Musk is a Nazi based on this alone.

But if he keeps dogwhistling?

@bhtooefr @abbenm

Yeah, I kind of expected that.

I've been trying to replace that narrative with the more accurate (though still imperfect) "the 0.001% control the press (and everything else)".

I do hope Musk realizes he has made a mistake and tries to rectify it, but I doubt his awareness is at that level. :-/

@brainblasted https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1000560049389907969

@gargron @brainblasted Bwaahahahaha this is amazing

@kaniini On a totally different topic, could you add class="mention" (microformats) to mentions in Pleroma so we don't attempt to display a preview card for them?

@kaniini yup

@Gargron @kaniini oh my, would be cool to solve it finally

@stevelord You see, the correct answer to who owns the media is Murdoch, Koch Brothers, & other rich conservatives. But the way his tweet was framed it could equally mean Jewish people ("Jews control the media") and so it's the perfect dogwhistle. What matters is not his intent, now, but that (as evidences by the replies) a lot of people heard the dogwhistle.

@Gargron I find it hard to work out how the content of his tweet constitutes a dog whistle. If you and I both know it's rich conservatives, and he's being maligned by a press run by rich conservatives, where does anti-semitism come into it?

If he didn't intend to be anti-semitic, then the people drawing that conclusion are wrong. Thats their fault surely for misinterpreting him, not his.

@stevelord @Gargron Speech isn't in a vacuum, and one has a degree of responsibility for knowing their audience and how their speech will be perceived in the societal context of the speech - what the speaker meant to say is meaningless, what the audience understood is everything.

In this case, Musk - whether intentionally or unintentionally - said something that could easily be taken - and in fact *WAS* taken by both Nazis and non-Nazis - as a reference to an ages-old anti-semitic meme.

@bhtooefr @Gargron I'm going to respectfully disagree here. If you say that people are responsible for knowing how Internet randos interpret their ramblings, no-one should speak ever.

I could accuse you of failing to meet those responsibilities for example, not because my objections are valid, but because you handed over your agency to random Internet assholes.

@stevelord @Gargron There's a point at which it's impractical to blame the speaker, sure, because of things like malicious misinterpretation - nothing is perfectly clear-cut. (I'll also give ESL speakers more of a pass, as an example.)

But, ultimately, it is the speaker's responsibility to make their meaning clear, especially when that speaker is a public figure. And, in this case, the meaning *ISN'T* clear. He said it in a way that could easily be interpreted in an extremely anti-semitic way.

@bhtooefr @Gargron I'm all for stomping out anti-semitism, but it could be interpreted in multiple ways one of which is anti-semitic. That a call to anti-semitism is implicit rather than explicit assumes an intent that can't even be qualified. This is part of Twitter's dumpster fire and nuance problem, one I hope the fediverse can avoid.

@stevelord @Gargron The *best* case here is that his tweet wasn't intended as malicious towards Jews, and that he meant to imply rich corporatists (I refuse to use "conservatives" to refer to Murdoch, Koch, et. al.), but it was negligent in that it referenced those anti-semitic memes.

The problem, as I said elsewhere in the thread, is that dogwhistling has plausible deniability, you basically have to use heuristics like frequency of dogwhistles to determine whether they're intentional.

@bhtooefr @Gargron I would argue that if you don't like what he says, the block button is your friend.

People saying that, "Trying to speak out against an oppressive super-rich class constitutes anti-semitism through indirect implication regardless of intent" are doing precisely what that super-rich oppressive class wants - fighting against themselves instead of fighting against them.

@stevelord @Gargron That's... not what's being said, though.

What's being said is that if you're going to speak out against an oppressive super-rich class, maybe be careful about how you do it, or otherwise you'll accidentally speak out against a persecuted class *instead*. Speak out against the actual oppressive super-rich class.

(And, of course, there's an undercurrent here of... Musk is kinda super-rich himself, too, which makes class arguments weaker.)

@bhtooefr @Gargron It's fair to accuse him of hypocrisy (super-rich, exploiting workers, all of a sudden interested in our protection).

But he *was* speaking out against the actual oppressive super-rich class. He was obviously speaking out against the press that maligned him, as that's where his beef lies.

Screaming anti-semitism when there's no indication of such intent is crying wolf and runs contrary to fighting anti-semitism.

Has he recently made explicitly anti-semitic tweets?

@stevelord @Gargron Not that I'm aware, although that's actually one reason that I don't want to block him - so that I can keep an eye to ensure nothing more comes up. If nothing more comes up, then he likely did mean Murdoch, Koch, et. al., something I can agree 100% with.

(There's other reasons that I won't block, too - I rarely block at all, I rarely visit Twitter any more, and I also own TSLA stock and keeping an eye on Musk's Twitter account isn't a bad idea as an investor.)

@bhtooefr @Gargron If there's nothing else in his TL, that's a big indicator of intent in itself. Something I think Twitter really sucks at thanks to it's threading model.

I get the investment issue. It might be worth looking at investment activist groups with significant holdings if you think it's worth pushing for a statement from him.

@stevelord @Gargron So it looks like this is what he's referenced (he liked the tweet): https://twitter.com/martinengwicht/status/999590946647003136

Original source appears to be this article: https://swprs.org/the-american-empire-and-its-media/

So now we go off to RationalWiki, and... https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Council_on_Foreign_Relations

"CFR is a staple target of conspiracy theories, usually relating to the New World Order, North American Union, Illuminati, Freemasonry and the international Jewish conspiracy (especially due to Henry Kissinger's presence)."

🙃

@bhtooefr @Gargron Do you think he read the source *and* bought into one specific conspiracy charge levelled at CFR so he can secretly signal his hatred of Jews through ambiguous tweets, or is it possible, given his lack of explictly anti-semitic tweets he just retweeted a person who agreed with him and showed something that appears to vaguely back up his argument?

@stevelord @Gargron I'm basically treating this as a data point, not enough to draw conclusions.

Either hypothesis is plausible at this point.

@bhtooefr @Gargron I think the former throws the principle of charity out of the window, while the latter on the balance of probabilities is more likely.

However, this really is a convo for birdsite rather than here. Thanks for the chat though.

@bhtooefr @Gargron @stevelord Seems like Lord Techbro could sort this all out pretty easily with a simple "Yikes guys, I meant Murdoch for goodness' sakes, get your Nazi crap off my timeline you bunch of pathetic goons."

I reckon even odds on whether he does that, doubles down and goes full Infowars, or gives a denial with a nod and a wink to his new hordes of Nazi followers.