“The personal data processed by this X subcontractor includes data of a sovereign nature. An identity document is a sensitive document. This raises a number of questions…”
In late May, online influencers who produce revenue-generating content on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, received notifications that they will have to pass identity verification checks by July 1. Those checks require users to take a selfie and a photograph of a government-issued ID. Failure to do this will mean they will no longer continue receiving income from the platform. According to some sources, content producers that have not yet provided the requested photos are already being locked out of their accounts.
Here’s a screenshot of the automated message sent to users with creator subscriptions and ads revenue share programs, courtesy of the user known as Censored Men:
Naturally, many users are up in arms about this new condition, particularly those with liberal (in the classic sense) sensibilities. After all, Elon Musk himself posted a tweet in July 2023 stating that his X platform would protect anonymous users, or “anons” as he called them.
This platform will protect anons for this reason particularly
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 9, 2023
There is a very important lesson in all this — one that Yves flagged up in her 2021 post, If Your Business Depends on a Platform, You Don’t Have a Business:
[I]t’s all well and good to want to be the creative person and not be bogged down with having to deal with the business side of publishing (and trust me, I do not like administrativa). However, when you choose to hand off the tech and monetization activities to the suits, you are at their mercy.
Sensitive and “Sovereign” Data
Users’ concerns on Twitter/X were further magnified when they learnt that the company that would be handling the face biometrics matching is AU10TIX, an Israeli firm with deep ties to the country’s intelligence agencies. It is also a big global player in the fast-emerging digital identity industry. In a 2023 article, the company identified lack of public awareness and trust and concerns about security and privacy as major obstacles to the mass roll out of digital IDs. In response, the article said, “governments and organizations must prioritize educating the public about the benefits, security measures, and safeguards associated with digital identities.”
🔒Are digital IDs the ultimate game-changer for global identification? 🔒 Join the discussion on the current usage, challenges hindering adoption, and the promising future of #DigitalIDs. Read the full article here ➡️ https://t.co/xeXy8m2exA pic.twitter.com/lq3Shn2O6R
— AU10TIX (@AU10TIXLimited) July 23, 2023
In other words, not only will X’s premium users have to give up their biometric details and a government-issued ID number in order to be able to continue generating an income stream on the platform, the company to which they will be entrusting that sensitive data is deeply embedded within Israel’s intelligence security complex. This is particularly worrisome for users living in Arabic countries with strained relations with Israel, reports the Lebanese newspaper L’Orient Today:
The problem is that AU10TIX, the company chosen to process users’ personal data, is based just outside Tel Aviv. This could complicate access to account verification for citizens of Arab countries that have not normalized their relations with Israel. Notably, many services with close links to Israel are banned in Lebanon, as there is no peace agreement between the two countries.
For Hadi Khoury, an IT expert, the concern is understandable. “The personal data processed by this X subcontractor includes data of a sovereign nature. An identity document is a sensitive document. This raises a number of questions: is this company capable of keeping personal data secure? Is it aware of its responsibilities and its duty to notify in the event of a data leak?”
The X platform’s intentions to impose biometric verification were already evident in August last year. App researcher Nima Owji revealed that the social media platform was working on a new selfie biometrics and ID document verification process. Owji noted via screenshots that the new identity verification process would require users to take a selfie and photograph a government-issued ID. Days later, Twitter disclosed that it had added two new sections to its data collection privacy policy. Per CNN:
“Based on your consent, we may collect and use your biometric information for safety, security, and identification purposes,” the policy read.
In addition, under a new section labeled “job applications,” X said it may collect users’ employment and educational history.
The company also said it could collect “employment preferences, skills and abilities, job search activity and engagement, and so on” in order to suggest potential job openings to users, to share that information with prospective third-party employers or to further target users with advertising.
For X Premium users, the company will give an option to provide a government ID and a selfie image for verification purposes. The company may extract biometric data from both the government ID and the selfie image for matching purposes, the company told CNN in a statement.
“This will additionally helps us tie, for those that choose, an account to a real person by processing their Government issued ID,” according to the company.
Note the use of the word “choose”, as if the platform’s premium users will have any real choice in the matter. If they want to remain a premium user and continue making money through the platform, they must, as things currently stand, submit the data requested — in return for what Tech Crunch described last August as “almost no benefits.” The company insists that the verification feature will be applicable only to Premium users with creator subscriptions and ads revenue share programs, and an optional extra for all other Twitter users.
That, as I will explain a little later, is unlikely. But first…
Who or What Is Au10tix?
AU10TIX is an identity verification and risk management company that began life in 2002 as the technological division of Dutch-based parent company ICTS International CV. This is where things start getting “spooky”. ICTS was founded in 1982 by former members of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, and airline security agents of El Al, Israel’s flagship airline. It develops products and provides consulting and personnel services in the field of aviation and general security. According to Wikipedia, that includes “operating airport checkpoints and electronic equipment, such as x-ray screening devices”, and “verifying travel documents.”
AU10TIX’s product suite includes an Identity Verification Suite, Serial Fraud Monitor and Reusable Digital ID, as well as the AU10TIX Platform, a hub unifying the company’s backend technology and frontend interfaces. Its clients include some of the biggest technology companies in the world, including Google, Uber, Airbnb, PayPal, LinkedIn, and Fiverr. X has been using its services for almost four years, well before Musk bought the platform, and is one of its ten largest clients.
AU10TIX also recently teamed up with Thomson Reuters, the self-described “world’s largest international multimedia news provider,” to provide its customers with what they call “identity verification at every level,” which includes “end-to-end identity verification, authentication, and fraud prevention services.” For customers looking for an an additional level of security, AU10TIX DOUBLECHECK “offers manual reviews by their trained personnel in sensitive situations and for verifying unclassified documents.”
AU10TIX enables its customers to verify the identity of their users by rapidly checking their ID card or driver’s license. And uploading the data couldn’t be quicker, simpler or more painless for users, as the Israeli media giant Globes soothingly reports: “All the user needs to do is scan the certificate with the phone and speak for a few seconds in front of the camera – and the verification process is complete in up to eight seconds.”
But it’s what happens to the data afterwards that worries some Twitter users. Though AU10TIX insists that it “is committed to every international standard on protecting privacy and does not pass on details to any third party,” not everyone is convinced.
Why is X forcing us to send our biometric and government id data to an Israeli company?
Monetization => ID verification => Israel (Au10tix)?
Including selfie! pic.twitter.com/QbOLBovk82
— S.L. Kanthan (@Kanthan2030) May 25, 2024
Israel’s Industrial Industrial Complex
The paranoia is probably warranted given: a) the sensitivity of the data being requested; b) the user terms and conditions on offer, including granting X the right to store users’ “full name, address and hashes of [their] digital identity number for as long as [they] participate in the Creator Subscription or Ads Revenue program”; and c) the deep connections between AU10TIX’s parent company (already mentioned), AU10TIX’s senior executives and Israel’s intelligence industrial complex.
From the Lebanese newspaper L’Orient de Jour (English version):
Ron Atzmon, the founder of AU10TIX, spent his military service with the Shin Bet’s notorious unit 8200. With a staff numbering between 5,000 and 10,000, this unit is Israel’s main intelligence strike force, providing it with “90 percent of its intelligence material,” Yair Cohen, who headed the unit for five years, told Forbes.
More than a mere military unit, 8200 serves as an incubator for Israel’s tech industry, which accounts for 14 percent of the country’s jobs and nearly 20 percent of its GDP. Waze, Wix, Viber and NSO, which produced the infamous Pegasus spyware, have one thing in common: their founders include former members of the unit.
“The problem is the porosity between the Israeli tech and the defense world,” said [Hadi Khoury, an IT expert]. Israel has reached this level of technological sophistication thanks to this porosity and the financial support that links defense to technology start-ups. It’s part of their defense strategy in order to build supremacy.”
Israeli media are denying the allegations that Atzman or AU10TIX’s current CEO, Dan Yerushalmi, have connections with unit 8200. According to the Globes article, Atzmon is an Israel Navy veteran, while Yerushalmi was an adjutant in the IDF Communications Corps. In a 2018 article, the Times of Israel claimed that “only six of the 35 companies [in Israel’s cyber security industry] had founders from the fabled Unit 8200, the Israeli equivalent of the NSA”. But it didn’t say which ones.
What is beyond doubt are the strong ties Yerushalmi has with Check Point Software Technologies (CPST), Israel’s fourth largest company, having previously served as its Risk Officer and Chief Customer Officer. CPST is a Tel Aviv-based US-Israeli cybersecurity company whose customers include governments and large corporations, including some of Israel’s biggest arms companies. Both the founder of CPST, Gil Shwed, and its vice president, Dorit Dor, served in Unit 8200.
One Thing We Can Count On: Mission Creep
As for the X/Twitter users whose livelihood, or part of it, depends on X/Twitter, they now face a stark choice: hand over data of a highly sensitive nature to AU10TIX or risk losing a chunk of their daily bread. Presumably, most of them will choose the former — after all, what is potentially at stake is not just money but also all the hordes of followers they have built up over the years, and followers = influence. Next, the same stark choice will be presented to blue-tick subscribers who do not have creator subscriptions or ads revenue share programs. And then lastly, everyone else.
Mission creep is one of the few guarantees of these digital identity initiatives. We’ve already seen this play out with the vaccine passports that were initially marketed as purely optional but quickly became necessary for just about everything, from being able to travel to accessing basic public services and places, to even holding onto your job. We will soon see the same occur with the digital identity wallet programs rapidly rolling out across the West (and just about everywhere else) as well as with online platforms. If you want to use social media platforms in the future, even as they rapidly degrade, you will have to give up your biometrics, ID number and any other personal data they request.
With regard to Twitter/X, we know this to be true because Elon Musk’s himself has already said as much — at the 2023 edition of the World Government Summit, just months after completing his purchase of Twitter:
I have this long-term ambition. It’s something called X.com from way back in the day which is kind of like an everything app. It is maximally useful. It does payments, it provides financial services, it provides information flow, really anything digital… It also provides secure communications, you know, be as useful as possible, as entertaining as possible, and also to be a source of truth.
To find out what is going on, what is really go on, you should be able to go on X and find out. So, it is a source of truth and a maximally useful… system. And Twitter is essentially an accelerant to that maximally useful “everything” app…
I think trying to have as many organisations and people… verified as being those organisations and people is important. And to have the organisational affiliation clearly identified so that if you want to find out if… an account is actually from a member of parliament or journalist or if, let’s say, a Twitter handle actually belongs to the Disney corporation or something like that, you can go on Twitter and it’s sort like an identity layer of the Internet. You can confirm that that is actually the case. Once you’ve got these interlocking identities, it’s very hard to be deceptive.
But “deceptive” is precisely the adjective one might use to describe Elon Musk’s behaviour since taking over Twitter. He has duped millions of Twitter users into thinking of him as a champion of freedom of speech, as well as other equally important freedoms and rights, yet what he really wants is to create his own “super app” that will give him access to unprecedented volumes of user data.
Musk’s plans have drawn inevitable comparisons, including from Musk himself, with the We Chat super app in China, which has a staggering 1.3 billion monthly users and can be used for a myriad of daily activities, from reading the news to chatting with friends, to hailing rides, to paying bills and taxes. But as Tech Crunch noted in 2022, while “a super app might bring convenience to users as they hardly need to leave the platform — which in turn helps drive revenues for the company — …the model can stifle competition and rule out user choices.”
Musk’s plans for X are likely to be unattainable anyway, largely due to the fierce competition he would face from other tech giants that “already have a stronghold in their sectors and control over user data.” Meanwhile, a backlash of sorts has begun brewing on the platform Musk wants to use as an accelerant for his “everything” app, particularly among libertarian users for whom Musk is — or at least was until recently — a hero. After days of silence, the tech mogul finally tweeted: “I will investigate this.”
This response — whether genuine or not — appears to have set off jitters in Israel. The Israeli tech news site Calcalistech warns that Musk’s refusal to reject outright the allegations against AU10TIX “only strengthens them and raises the fear that Musk will act to satisfy the anti-Israel users and stop the engagement with AU10TIX.” Such an outcome could have “devastating potential not only for the company but for all Israeli companies that deal with cyber protection and information security issues, as it will make them all suspicious and may ignite an extensive campaign to stop contracting with them on the part of large technology companies.”
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We had been giving that “If your business depends on a platform, you don’t have a business” a lot, so I am sort of surprised that I did make a post out of it but not until so late.
I am a latecomer to the world of ‘alternative media’ and recently closed my Twitter account for good. I never joined Facebook and resent/boycott businesses that use PayPal.
I decided to become a paid subscriber to Naked Capitalism and a few substacks after realizing that my ‘lurking’ on Twitter grew into a need for dopamine hits. I was astonished by my overly emotional reaction and oftentimes shocked at my own responses. I regret I gave them so much insight into my brain. I knew better from reading Whitney Webb that both US and Israeli intelligence dominated the space for a very long time yet I persisted. She predicted all of this using lots of corroborating evidence. These sociopaths can’t help but to boast of their plans to control.
Yves, I admire your commitment.
I was only on Twitter for about a month and quit because I noticed that my behavior was sometimes awful. I became more pointed, sarcastic (in a bad way), and nasty than I would ever accept from myself in real life. It brought out an ugly side I had thought I had vanquished. Oh well, more work to be done. Always more work!
What if they block all the platforms? A single platform for a business is unwise, but internet and much else is becoming increasingly centralized; the various media outfits and payment platforms all having connections with the government or having rules that are effectively the same.
I think that the goal is to gain control of the financial backend that all businesses need as well as the media platforms for everyone depends for communications of any kind. One step at a time.
You have your own servers. What is so hard about that? And we do not use the cloud, our backup is at another host on dedicated servers, as in racks we control. You do business with smaller providers.
We encourage readers to use checks for the avoidance of fees but it also has readers dealing with us directly, not through a middleman.
We now have a merchant account (and the provider TOTALLY SUCKS) but again we have more control than say through a third party service.
In one move this wipes out a big chunk of the Israel-critical, anti-genocide Creator commentariat. If you were posting pro-Palestinian content you’re definitely facing quite a dilemma. The timing is interesting.
I know I’m in the minority but I do believe Musk was sincere in his libertarian-like desire to preserve privacy. I’m very curious as to the inside story of who or what got him to compromise on what was his core principle, the whole reason he purchased X in the first place.
Why do you people look up to Musk, the guy has always been a complete douche, corny as can be, selfish, controlling, scumbag.
But keep thinking he’s your cool friend. It’s like Steve Jobs all over again.
GDmofo: Who are the “you people” you’re referencing here? I don’t think anyone here looks up to Musk. Sounds like you don’t want to be here.
I agree with all of those descriptors, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be right sometimes.
I don’t see anything in the comment you’re responding to that suggests the author looks up to Musk, and I think you would struggle to find many people here that do.
” I’m very curious as to the inside story of who or what got him to compromise on what was his core principle”
The origin story of the surveillance tech that people blindly call “social media” is one tied up with authoritarian institutions.
The whole “don’t be evil” or progressive geek images are a con.
How and when did Elon get compromised?
That is a reasonable question, given the circumstances and environment.
How long until a verified DNA sample is added to the identity requirements?
“How long until a verified DNA sample is added to the identity required?”
I would say I hope that people would not be that damn stupid over social media. However, the con of AI is to get everyone on a platform and have them do modern day sharecropping there. It’s a way to put their authoritarian platforms in between you and ANY job you are doing.
The way out of the situation would require bloodshed.
And question 2, how long until the digital copies of all that unique identifying information are turning up everywhere on the net, verifying just about anything?
Mr. Musk probably came to this conclusion from reading thousands of a tweets a day, which is his claim, on the most trusted and reliable source there is, which is again his repeated claim.
That’s my sarcastic response to the notion that Elon Musk ever held any positon that could be “compromised.”
If he knows anything about technology, and there’s no reason to think he does, Musk may be jealous of Pegasus Spyware and eager to have the powerful revere him in the same way. (And swipe fees being what they are, or course he wants a credit card. His previous efforts at banking were laughable, even for him, but when he being completely wrong made Elin reconsider his goals?)
He is capable of getting deep into the weeds on technology, engineering, design, physics, rocketry. It’s when he comments on anything outside of these that he gets into trouble.
Having said that, this latest development has made me curious. He had an ideology, the ideology was privacy and freedom of expression, people motivated by ideology tend to be very entrenched, and now he’s basically selling his soul. Something has caused him to flip. Has he been persuaded that privacy and freedom of expression are no longer valid ideologies? Have his politics shifted closer to fascism? If so, who by, and how?
He wants to turn it into a banking app. That requires some kind of Identification. Though you can open a brokerage acct and start paying yourself by e-signing a form.
The Israeli company, which was onboard with Twitter under the previous regime, wants a lot more than that.
Very plausible, that. And yes, the Israeli company definitely wants something else.
“How and when did Elon get compromised?”
If I were going to be generous, I would say around the time of getting his first billion.
I agree wealth always compromises but I think Musk is at the point where he’s so wealthy the money is just an abstraction he doesn’t even need to think about, he has other people doing that for him. Even after the first few billions he seemed to care about privacy and expression enough to not shut up about it, to tweet about it always, freedom of speech this, freedom of speech that, privacy this, privacy that, OH NO THE LEFTY THOUGHT POLICE ARE EATING OUR BRAINS, we have no freedom! And now he’s like hey everyone if you want speech you must give up your privacy, and to an obscure organization, part of a fascist government, in a fascist country currently committing a genocide.
Sorry but there has to be something which led from point A to B.
Maybe being compromised is fundamental to qualifying for the “Big Boys” club. A sort of mutually assured destruction. And when interests align just so for others in the club, they trot out your file and get you back into line.
Well there was that recent visit to Israel where Netanyahu helped Musk get his mind right about “antisemitism” on twitter – https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-israel-visit-antisemitism-netanyahu-e9936848c37b364c2a24a59a04b54fb7
While I applaud Musk for releasing the twitter files, I’m under no illusion that he is any kind of champion of free speech. Like most, he just doesn’t want speech he approves of surveilled and censored – others are fair game.
The man behind Neuralink has as a core principle a desire to preserve privacy.
Interesting application of his core principle.
I don’t think Musk ever had core principles beyond self aggrandizement and wealth.
He took the freedom of expression position for a short while but folded real quick as its (rather obvious when you think about it) incompatibility with ad profits manifest. He enjoyed the attention and being hated by the establishment and mainstream but that’s all irrelevant if the business goes under.
Trolls. Malicious anonymous users who post illegal material forcing the platform to spend large amounts of money on moderation.
And yes, plenty of them work for government 3 letter agencies trying to discredit the platform.
Think back to the noise that Elon Musk made about all the “bot” accounts on Twitter just before he closed the purchase. I think he’s discovered that getting rid of the fake/bot accounts is a little harder than he realized. This “identity verification” scheme is his hail-mary attempt to clean up the X/Twitter accounts.
And if he manages to pull off moving “X” into financial services, the Federal “Know Your Customer” regulations mandate this kind of verification. If Elon wants to have a chance of not ending up in jail for money laundering…
He has serious issues with the compensation issues at Tesla. It’s quite complicated but the reality is he wants 25% ownership and the board’s recent proxy statement/vote outlines some egregious legal issues. Here is a nice summary from a legal scholar.
https://montanaskeptic.substack.com/p/musk-is-stuck-in-delaware
Whitney Webb has reported extensively about his ties with government going back years. Government contracts providing intelligence data on citizens has a very high cost to everyone involved and benefits exactly no one.
Thanks for the important report. Nikki Haley–basically an Israeli mouthpiece–said that everyone on the internet should be forced to reveal their true identity for reasons that I think we know are obvious. First they came for the Columbia students and then they will come for everyone else who objects to the warfare state. This has always been the business model of social media (after all the entire purpose of Facebook is to promote yourself as a real person) but the excuse was that it was merely for commercial purposes and targeted advertising. But since that business model so nicely intersects with Big Brotherism why wouldn’t they turn it into something.else? In an age of genocide “just trust us” doesn’t mean very much.
Musk needs to receive the blackest of black eyes over this and perhaps reports like the above will be a start.
Haley with that statement should be disqualified to run for any public office higher than dogcatcher.
She is a carpetbagger who has no understanding of the importance of freedom of expression and how the country was founded. She either wasn’t paying attention in history class, or didn’t bother with that as her business degrees only taught her new and improved ways of cheating.
I searched for the origin of “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” and noticed that the truth of the quote is so well understood through the centuries that origins were deemed “apocryphal.” The term “data of a sovereign nature” underscores the issue nicely.
Oddly enough, I can’t find a source for the corollary quote: “and the price of eternal vigilance is insanity”. Presumably based on sleep deprivation studies. Kurt Vonnegut?
I’ve reckoned for a long time now that the basic business model for Silicon Valley is to set up some sort of platform – it does not matter what – and then use it to sell out their customers. That is why Silicon Valley has an insatiable demand for data from the people that use their products. Here Musk is selling out his more valued customers to an Israeli spook organization but as they are Israeli, do not not expect to see Musk in front of a Senate inquiry and having to justify why he did not choose an American company instead. But I would not be surprised if the plan is to have ALL of Twitter’s users have to do the same one day to keep their accounts. It’s coming.
It’s a life cycle of a tech company, idea -> free growth -> monetization -> crapification -> decline. It’s just that some are taking longer than others to go through the cycle.
Cory Doctorow call this “enshittification”. I believe he coined the term, and if you search for his name plus that word you’ll find a lot of info. It’s also appears to be becoming more common, almost mainstream.
It took longer this time thanks to ZIRP etc pushing VC to put their money into startups rather than securities.
Once the fed started hiking the interest rates the demands for profits arose as VC wandered off to more profitable pastures.
And that, Rev Kev, explains a lot about AI and ChatGPT in particular.
Large Language Models, like ChatGPT, hoover up the content on the internet (and elsewhere), load it into their model, and use that data to predict the next word likely to be used on a subject, in a context … and then “speak” to we humans … what it’s learned from … us humans.
LLMs, a form of AI is simply reporting upon _what humans have created_.
ChatGPT doesn’t pay those humans for their effort. It takes the knowledge humans created, takes it from the Commons, then parrots that knowledge, obtained from _humans_ … back to we humans.
But there’s a key difference: ChatGPT (and the like) have ownership of that knowledge. They’ve figured out how to monetize the most expansive, valuable, crucial part of the human commons there is: our knowledge.
This is a prime example of expropriating the commons on behalf of the few – the “few” being the people with the capital and the acquisitiveness (selfishness) to take what others have created.
So, Rev Kev, you’ve hit the nail on the head.
Note also that the data centers, where this AI is running, require immense amounts of new power generating capacity, and a lot of new transmission capacity.
Who pays for that new capacity? Not the data centers; they have sweetheart deals with the power companies, because “they buy so much power”. They get _very_ preferential rates for the power they use. The _rest_ of us pay for this new capacity.
Who can forget the US NSA’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) program? Defunded by Congress in 2003 after public uproar, but continues in other guises. Big Tech surveillance and social media grew out of DARPA grants. / ;)
https://whyy.org/segments/facebook-a-computing-pioneer-a-secret-government-program-and-a-strange-coincidence/
and per Wiki on the TIA program:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness
adding: I remember the many 2012 MSM articles nudging people to signup for a Facebook account. Articles like this Forbes article:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/08/06/beware-tech-abandoners-people-without-facebook-accounts-are-suspicious
And the Twitter browsing public too. Same with Youtube users who are not members. It’s already known that just opening the Facebook page on the browser will give away enough info about oneself to help identify the person.
The worst part of this digital revolution is the user or browser will populate the date base for the companies on the web. For instance, Insurance companies (rogues) want you to sign in and use their website so that you can do the work for them every step of the way.
Privacy went out the door a long time ago!
If all the people concerned about this policy just quit won’t X just become one big echo chamber that no one else uses?
Mission Creep, formally known as Elon Musk?
I wondr if that’s how they refer to him in the SpaceX control room?
“And you may ask yourself…same as it ever was, same as it ever was…” Soon publishing in any media will require the “royal act” biometric or otherwise.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most states engaged in pre-publication censorship. In France, all new books had to receive authorization from the royal chancellery (Edict of Moulins, 1566). Up until the eighteenth century, this involved a royal act—a privilege or approval—that was given after examination of the work
https://ehne.fr/en/encyclopedia/themes/european-humanism/europe-knowledge/censorship-in-europe-seventeenth-eighteenth-century
What’s the point of notification of a bio-metric data leak? Once it’s compromised, it’s for life.
I am going to invest in a paper & pulp stock.
Very witty of you! :) :)
It is hard to believe that social media users, who enjoy sharing their homes, workplaces, and relationships with the world 24/7 for free, along with photos and location information, would refuse to provide personal information to foreign companies.
The latest example of Techno-totalitarian neo-feudalism.
Elon the Oligarch, whadda guy eh? Our twisted “society” rewards sociopaths and parasites, punishes the productive.
I’m starting to think that before this is all over, there will need to be a truth and reconciliation commission for Big Tech — at least.
I agree
Technology is just a tool…. used for good and bad. Why would anyone think “technology”, wouldn’t be a means to enslave us all?
Look at IBM during WW2… when it’s just business,
the tech bro’s… working with the new nazi administration of germany…. come up with a numerical code for keeping track of “undesirables”…then they make the machinery, and the paper stock to record the influx of all these “undesirables”, or as hillary would put it; deplorables… but popular history only remembers the tattoo’s on prisoners arms from the concentration camps… and doesn’t realize the amount of work put into that system.
This world desperately needs a serious Truth and Reconciliation movement.
I’d say this will be bad for Twitter, but Elon stans seem to have no limits to what they’ll endure to please him.
Aside from the great reporting, here, indicating how Arab people are being impacted on Twitter, we are taking a slightly different road in understanding these latest caviates from Mr. Musk.
When Twitter folks signed up to enhance their “free speech” SOMEBODY was paying for all that. Was Musk doling out a few bucks to them?. Perhaps.
In which case, if you read Dr. Michael Hudson, you learn that the US Financial Hegemon is starting to wobble. Amongst the many issues facing the US/EU/UK System, it’s also trying to deal with Russia/China/some Brics nations that are beginning to secede from the IRON JAWS of the US Dollar.
Somewhere in that maze, these multi-billionaires are beginning to lose out a little. Meaning, Musk & all the others realize the Capitalist System isn’t going to last forever. With that insight, it’s only natural that constrictions would be placed on those specific Twitter folks. Forget about “Free Speech.” It is a Mirage.
The u.s. government and MIC are not so very distant from the Israeli government and MIC. Sharing private information with a foreign power as bloody minded as the Israelis have proved is anathema, but sharing that kind of private information with the u.s. government is worse.
the us gov’t and the isreali intelligence state are so joined at the hip, I have to assume anything one has…. so too will the other.
The last time I came back to the US, they required a scan of your eyes to get through customs….(unless you want to volunteer for a cavity search. no duress there)…they are stealing our biometric data everywhere now… And I can only assume it will all be hoovered up by the central scrutinizers, sooner or later. and shared… ad infinitum
All of govt., down to the city and county level sell your data to the corps. I’ll betcha you’ll find your data such as date of birth easily available on the internet.
exactly!
The most spooky aspect is the threats by some billionaires to blacklist protesting students, which makes me think about a possible service to employers, “security check of political views”, so they can discriminate to their heart content. Seems that some employers can be VERY interested.
And to think, many people still think that the U.S.A. is the land of the free. Every year the Rights, Freedoms and Privacy of the U.S. population gets less and less as the noose gets tighter and tighter.